Eat meat

Remember back in junior high school when the boys who liked certain girls would start picking on them instead of being polite? I am not sure the junior high mentality ever ends because the cow is now the cute girl on the playground that everybody must really, really like because there is list long list of folks picking on her.

It reminds me of the saying by Hank Vogler, from Nevada, “Everybody loves the cowboy, but they sure hate the cow.” Why?

I believe it is that the cow, even more so than the horse, is the symbol of our freedom and independence. The cow is fairly maintenance free. We mess with her a couple times each year but otherwise she is out there in God’s creation churning otherwise useless cellulose material into the essentials of life.

There is now a quest to take a drop of fetal blood from the pregnant cow and turn it into lab-grown meat. Then you have the veggie heads who think they can replace the cow with plant-based proteins while completely disregarding the impact the cow has on improving plants to begin with. That’s not to mention the deficiency in micro-nutrients that only meat provides in improving human function, particularly cognition.

I am typically reluctant to do the public relations work for those who attack animal agriculture, but I see no choice but to tell you about the work of EAT-Lancet. It is promoting a blatant selective portrayal of the truth with the intent of destroying the cow and, in turn, our personal freedom.

A United Kingdom publication called The Mirror was the first I know of to point out the hypocrisy of this movement. The mastermind behind the entire movement, which started in 2013, is a model from Norway.

The following profile is from the Jan. 17, 2019, edition of the The Mirror:

“Gunhild Stordalen, a Norwegian who owns a £20 million private jet with her husband, regularly flies to exotic destinations around the world.”

This group she has assembled includes wealthy individuals from around the world and celebrities who love to hear themselves talk, but it’s not hard to figure out what they are intentionally leaving out. Beef clearly plays a role in cognition in the human. Undoubtedly their lack of beef consumption is impairing their mental capacity.

Lindsay Allen of the University of California-Davis, while representing the U.S. Department of Agriculture, documented a two-year study in Kenya and concluded her work by stating, “Denying growing children animal products in their diet during the critical first few years of life was ‘unethical’ and could do permanent damage.”

The growing body of evidence that investigative researcher Nina Teicholz reported in her book “The Big Fat Surprise” revealed that during the past 40 years we have covered up the value of animal products in human health, which is “unethical.” Teicholz documented how our consumption of animal products has been trending downward and chronic disease has skyrocketed.

Aside from all the attacks on the consumption of animal products relating to human health, my real pet peeve is the misconception of the value of the cow to planet health. The cow grazes land that is otherwise not suitable for growing food. The cow improves the health and vitality of plants by grazing them and creates a healthier planet that absorbs more plant food (otherwise known as GHGs) from the atmosphere.

Through holistic management programs of those such as Allen Savory, researchers have documented that the greatest strategy for improving the resources we depend upon is increasing animal populations, not decreasing them. For example:

“Holistic management has also led to increased crop yield; in Patagonia, a flock of 25,000 sheep led to a 50 percent increase in the production of the land in the first year. Areas that had lost over 30 centimeters of soil and were barren were returned to healthy ecosystems without any signs of desertification.”

What is continually left out of these discussions is what happens if grazing does not occur. The greatest correction that Mother Nature can muster in the absence of grazing is wildfire.

Savory says, “burning one hectare of grassland gives off more CO2 and more damaging pollutants than 6,000 cars. And we are burning in Africa, every single year, more than one billion hectares.”

I don’t see the attack on our freedoms slowing up any time soon so I suggest that as soon as your finish eating that beef item for lunch, you spend as much time as possible educating every individual you come in contact with about how important animals are, not only to human health but to the planet as well.

Editor’s note: Trent Loos is a sixth generation United States farmer, host of the daily radio show, Loos Tales, and founder of Faces of Agriculture, a non-profit organization putting the human element back into the production of food. Get more information at www.LoosTales.com, or email Trent at [email protected].