Sacred Cows Make The Best Burgers

Sacred Cows Make the Best Burgers: Developing Change-Ready People and Organizations. That’s the title of a book by Robert J. Kriegel, David Brandt and sums up beautifully and succinctly the western views of cows and its relation with society. The world over, sacred cows are a metaphor for any outmoded belief or stubborn loyalty to a long-standing institution which impedes progress by not being responsive to opportunities and changed circumstances. It is the Western contention that the cow is literally worshiped, while thousands of humans suffer from undernourishment. Is India, well past its weaning stage, sucking away at the dry nipples of an outdated pastoral culture? Or, does a living cow make a better economic sense than a dead cow for the sound economics of rural India where 70% of India still lives?

Any social system is an ecosystem developed as a result of centuries of evolution, and anybody trying to modify it must necessarily study it first. You will then agree: kill not thy mother, the cow; and kill not thy father, the bull, too. A bull hired is more economical than a bull fired. An average landholder in India owns approximately one acre, a size not appropriate for the use of tractors that require the farmer to take loans. The energy-efficient bull subsists mainly on farm wastes and requires no maintenance contracts. Economical agricultural practices and no loans can mean no farmer suicides, as many of the suicides have been caused by the exorbitant interests charged by private money lenders. The cow provides him with organic manure in the form of dung, which his wife also uses as the fuel for ‘chulha’ – an earthenware stove used in rural households.

Women drying cow dung patties; Image credit: Flickr

Cow dung is the poor man’s wall paint; it keeps his hut cool in summer and warm in winter. Across Africa and Asia, you will find many rural communities living in huts plastered with cow dung. The cow dung has anti-microbial properties, and serves as his no-cost Lysol.

Masai women standing before their cow-dung-coated houses; Image Credit : TwoHelp.org

Even casual visitor to rural India would testify that far from depriving humans of food, the cows eat only inedible remains of harvested crops (rice hulls, tops of sugarcane, etc.) and grass and give products of immediate utility.

A very well known use of cow dung is for the production of bio gas. This is actually getting increasingly popular.

Cows make a sound ecological investment. Frances Moore Lappe, the author of “Diet for a Small Planet” writes that milk production is more efficient than meat production and requires fewer resources, as one pound of meat requires sixteen times the grain to feed the cattle than what an equivalent quantity of milk requires.

India has the largest concentration of livestock in the world, having one-third of the world’s cattle on approximately 3 percent of the world’s land area. The rural Indians have as much love for their cows as Westerners have for their pet dogs and cats. Even if cow slaughter is made permissible in India and beef is made available in plenty, it is bound to repulse people and it may not be easy to persuade them to eat it.

For Indians, cow is symbolic of abundance and wealth and of the sanctity of all life. Most Hindus respect the cow as a matriarchal figure for her gentle qualities and providing nurturing milk and other products for a largely vegetarian diet.

The recent media reports about the sale of dung medicines and cosmetic products such as toothpastes have drawn plenty of flak in various blogs. This reaction is perfectly understandable and something I can identify with. Average Westerners get tickled by the mere sight of cows on streets, and you can see them clicking away merrily rural women making and drying patties of cow dung and using it to light their hearth. To such a person, it would come as a great cultural shock to know that traditional forms of ancient medicines consider cow’s urine or dung as having a medicinal value. To use or even accept cow dung as either a fuel or a fertilizer, or to use it to manufacture bio-gas is one thing, but to use it inside human internal pathways is quite another. Unless you have solid research-based proof for its efficacy and safety, it’s bound to invoke derision. And you must be sensitive to that just as much as you would expect everybody to be sensitive to religious sentiments regarding its consumption.

Forget derision, it could be dangerous as well. My grandparents used to have cows in the backyard which they tended with care. They used to scrub it every morning and feed it with ground cotton seeds and bran, apart from feeding it hay. Most cows are now found on streets feeding on waste paper and, who but God knows, on plastic as well. Even assuming cow’s urine is therapeutic ( I can already hear somebody throwing up), such a vagrant cow’s urine certainly cannot be so. Why talk of ‘urine cola’, even cow dung fireplace can have health implications. Read the following story:  Cow dung smoke could cause arsenic poisoning

No amount of empirical observations or reasoning can make it a science. Only a thorough scientific research can.

Before you puke over cows’ excreta, let me draw attention to the following news story : Japanese researchers extract vanillin from cow dung

And in the near future, who knows, you might head to your primary health care center for a shot against allergy developed with input from the cow shed.

Is it the modern alchemy: turning cow dung into medicine?

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