I love stories like this:
Indolent cows languidly chewing their cud while befuddled motorists honk and maneuver their vehicles around them are images as stereotypically Indian as saffron-clad holy men and the Taj Mahal. Now, however, India’s ubiquitous cows – of which there are 283 million, more than anywhere else in the world – have assumed a more menacing role as they become part of the climate change debate.
The words “cow” and “menacing” … yeah, I’m just not putting those together.
Wait: adolescent bathroom humor coming up!
By burping, belching and excreting copious amounts of methane – a greenhouse gas that traps 20 times more heat than carbon dioxide – India’s livestock of roughly 485 million (including sheep and goats) contribute more to global warming than the vehicles they obstruct. With new research suggesting that emission of methane by Indian livestock is higher than previously estimated, scientists are furiously working at designing diets to help bovines and other ruminants eat better, stay more energetic and secrete lesser amounts of the offensive gas
I love it when they do this.
And just so you don’t think I’m hating on India, here’s a story from today’s Milwaukee Journal Sentinel:
WAUSAU, Wis. (AP) — The U.S. dairy industry wants to engineer the “cow of the future” to pass less gas, a project aimed at cutting the industry’s greenhouse gas emissions by 25 percent by 2020, industry leaders said Monday.
I wonder how many wives wish they could engineer the “husband of the future” for the same reason.
The state has about 1.25 million dairy cows, or about 14 percent of the national total.
The initiative could have a huge effect in Wisconsin. The state has about 1.25 million dairy cows, or about 14 percent of the national total.
…Cutting the dairy industry’s emissions by 25 percent would be equivalent to removing about 1.25 million passenger cars from the nation’s roads every year, Gallagher said.
So let’s see: that makes divorce, obesity, moose, children, Jews celebrating Hannukah, United Nations Climate Change Conferences, and now cows that are bad for the environment.
Fine, but if they start coming after pigs, I might stop taking them seriously.