Here is one more case of ancient wisdom, uniquely pertinent to the issue of greed. In one village there are two men who dispute ownership of a wild ass. Both claim ownership by right of having seen the animal first. One of the men is more prosperous than the other, yet he keeps bemoaning his poverty, the number of his children, and the poorness of his fields and he protests that the ass should be given to him because his is by far the greater need. A wise judge says to him: “You tell me that your need is the greater because you are poor and this other man is far wealthier than you; and when he says he is the poorer you say he is lying. Therefore I shall give a judgment that will adjust the wrong that he does to you. You, who are the poorer man, shall have the wild ass. And to show you how much you are favored, you and this other man shall exchange all your possessions.”
Now the man cries out in self-pity and says he has been robbed. At this, the judge pretends to be surprised. “Robbed? When I have given to you the greater possessions of your neighbor? Surely you don’t believe his claim that his possessions are meager, when you yourself have just assured me that he lies and his holdings are great. As an honest man, you must admit the exchange has indeed favored you.”3
A Cow Testifies in Court
In our own times, courtroom justice is not always so poetic or profound. But our judges sometimes manage to come up with creative ways of getting to the truth of a dispute.
On July 6, 1953, a California man named Mike Perkins was formally accused of stealing a calf from his neighbor’s ranch and then branding it with his own ranch’s insignia to conceal the theft. Mike stood before the judge and vehemently denied the charges, saying his neighbor had made the whole thing up out of jealousy.
The judge was going to find Perkins innocent, because the only evidence against him was the other farmer’s word. But then he had an idea: he sent the sheriff out to Perkins’s ranch and had him bring to a yard adjacent to the courthouse all of Perkins’s calves who were about the age the allegedly stolen calf was reputed to be. Then he sent the sheriff out to the accusing neighbor’s ranch and had him bring to the yard the cow who was alleged to be the mother of the stolen calf.
When the mother cow arrived, she began calling loudly and seemed to be trying to move toward the roped-in calves. The judge decreed that she be allowed freedom of movement. When she was let go, the cow gave her testimony to the court in no uncertain terms. She went directly over to the calves, nudged her way to one in particular, and began to lick it over and over, right on the hip, where Perkins’s brand “P” was located.
I probably don’t have to tell you Mike Perkins was found guilty.
What They’re Really Like
When I first heard what happened in this California court, I was surprised. There was an image in my mind of what cows could and couldn’t do, and I wouldn’t have thought this kind of thing possible. I was still, more than I knew, a prisoner of the common notion that animals are automata, with perhaps a dash of intelligence. But everything I have learned since then has shown me how wrong I was.
The truth is that cows have a special kind of intelligence and sensitivity. But because they are such patient and gentle souls who rarely hurry or make a fuss about things, we tend to think they are dumb and don’t recognize their unique presence. Rooted deeply in the rhythms of the earth, they move through life with a peacefulness that is not easy to disturb. They are not troubled by much of what bothers us, and when they are alarmed—usually by things we cannot see—they are still slow to panic and rarely overreact.
Aldous Huxley once said that in this century we have added onto the seven original deadly sins an eighth that is just as deadly—the sin of hurry. In terms of this sin, at least, cattle are saints.
Few of us today have much opportunity to experience for ourselves what kind of creature cattle are, and so we are easy prey to the common prejudices about them, which are born and thrive in ignorance. But a naturalist who knew cows well, W. H. Hudson, spoke movingly of
the gentle, large-brained, social cow, that caresses our hands and faces with her rough blue tongue, and is more like man’s sister than any other non-human being—the majestic, beautiful creature with the Juno eyes. 4
People of less sophisticated times, living in closer contact with the earth, had great respect for these patient and gentle souls. 2,000 years ago, the poet Ovid wrote:
Oh ox, how great are thy desserts! A being without guile, harmless, simple, willing for work.5
How Now, Brown Cow?
For centuries, these animals have pulled our plows, sweetened our soils, and given their milk to our children. Today, however, these peaceful and patient creatures have been rewarded for their centuries of service by being treated in much the same way as today’s chickens and pigs. You might think there are laws requiring them to be treated humanely. But harkening back to darker times, the Animal Welfare Act specifically excludes creatures intended for use as food from its regulations governing the “humane” treatment of animals.6 And though this law places some restrictions on how cruelly animals can be treated, cows, pigs, and chickens are evidently not considered animals within the meaning of the act. The current philosophy is that you can be as cruel as you like, as long as the animal is later going to be eaten.
The result isn’t very pretty.
You may wonder, as I have, how the people who actually handle the animals rationalize what they do. I asked a livestock auction worker named George Kennedy if he was ever uncomfortable with the way the animals were handled. He replied:
Look, if you want beef, this is the only way you can have it. There’s no room in this business for a “be nice to animals” attitude. There’s work to be done, and that’s all there is to it.
Later, I talked with the owner of the auction, a man named Henry F. Pace. I asked him how he felt about the charges from animal rights groups that the auctions were cruel to the cattle. He sized me up for a moment, then answered:
It doesn’t bother me. We’re no different from any other business. These animal rights people like to accuse us of mistreating our stock, but we believe we can be most efficient by not being emotional. We are a business, not a humane society, and our job is to sell merchandise at a profit. It’s no different from selling paper clips or refrigerators.
In the eyes of the law, Henry Pace is right. There are almost no legal limits on what can be done to the animals destined for our dinner tables.
A federal law, passed in 1906, does put certain basic restraints on the way cattle can be shipped by railroad. This law was passed to curb the cruelty that most of us would like to think belonged to a less enlightened time. But this law puts no restraints on the way animals can be shipped by truck, because trucks did not yet exist at the time this act was passed, and apparently the cattle industry has managed through the years to block the passage of any legislation that might extend the cow’s protection to include more modern transportation.
With a sharp eye for this kind of loophole, the meat industry today almost always ships cattle by truck. The journey, as you can probably guess by now, is a horror from start to finish.
If you were to step inside one of these trucks you’d be immediately struck by the smell. It wouldn’t take you very long to know that the ventilation is terrible. And you’d soon find out that the temperatures are scorching hot in the summer and bitterly cold in the winter. You’d see that these animals—ruminants whose stomachs function properly only with a more or less continuous supply of food—may spend as long as three days and nights without being fed or watered. One authority wrote:
It is difficult for us to imagine what this combination of fear, travel sickness, thirst, near-starvation, exhaustion, and (in winter)… severe chill feels like