Drop that Burger: An interview with the “Mad Cowboy”

Do you want fries with that?

The answer, my friends, is no. That is, if the “Mad Cowboy” has anything to say about it.

Following up on last week’s beef-tastic look into Arizona’s cattle industry, in which I spoke with former Beef Ambassador and current Arizona Beef Council spokeswoman Anna Groseta, I now present the flip-side of the cattle equation: an interview with Howard Lyman, a former Montana cattleman turned vegetarian activist, who has been dubbed the “Mad Cowboy” for his efforts to raise awareness about the dangers of mad cow disease and the calamitous environmental impact of meat production.

He is probably best remembered for his appearance on the Oprah Winfrey Show, where his comments about the beef industry ended up getting them both sued for libel by a group of Texas cattlemen. They won. (Lesson: don’t sue Oprah).
And just because it makes really fun reading, here’s a partial transcript of the talk with Oprah that landed them both in so much hot water:

Howard: Absolutely… 100,000 cows per year in the United States are fine at night, dead in the morning. The majority of those cows are rounded up, ground up, fed back to other cows. If only one of them has Mad Cow Disease, has the potential to effect thousands. Remember today, the United States, 14% of all cows by volume are ground up, turned into feed, and fed back to other animals.

Oprah: But cows are herbivores, they shouldn’t be eating other cows

Howard: That’s exactly right, and what we should be doing is exactly what nature says, we should have them eating grass not other cows. We’ve not only turned them into carnivores, we’ve turned them into cannibals.

Oprah: Now see, wait a minute, wait a minute. Let me just ask you this right now Howard. How do you know the cows are ground up and fed back to the other cows?

Howard: Oh, I’ve seen it. These are U.S.D.A. statistics, they’re not something we’re making up.

Oprah: Now doesn’t that concern you all a little bit, right here, hearing that?

Audience: Yeah!

Oprah: It has just stopped me cold from eating another burger!

Audience: (Claps loudly and shouts) yeah!

Now, the beef industry, by and large, has renounced this process of grinding up dead cows and feeding them to other cows, otherwise known as “bovine necro-cannibalism” (okay, I just made that word up). But according to Lyman, they are still using their substantial political power to keep investigators from looking too hard for cases of mad cow.

That’s not even to mention the myriad other harmful effects of our nearly 100-million strong population of cattle here in the United States.
(Disclaimer: this interview has been edited for clarity, and to make me look smarter)

The Footprint: Why should people care about the beef industry?

Howard Lyman: Right now we’re in the process of deciding whether human beings are going to survive on planet earth or not. Probably the quickest change we can make is to change our diet.
80 percent of the grain produced in the U.S. is stuffed down the throat of an animal –- 16 pounds of grain will feed 32 hungry people or one Rush Limbaugh.
TF: Americans are used to a meat-based diet. Is there any hope that there will be widespread change to that anytime soon?
HL: I believe in my lifetime that the majority of Americans will be eating a plant-based diet. Did you ever think people would change their attitude about smoking? Is there anybody in the US today that does not know that smoking is not good for your health? The cattle industry as we know it is going to go the same route as smoking…
It doesn’t happen overnight, but the train has left the station, and I believe that within this generation it will happen… I can remember that within ten years ago – you’d get on an airplane and order a vegan meal and they’d think you had a communicable disease.
…
There’s only one thing that ever changes human behavior, and that is crisis –- and we should thank god that we have one right now. What with the financial problems that we’re facing in the U.S. today… we’re going to find that we cannot afford a meat-based diet.

TF: What’s up with mad cow disease these days?
HL: If we take the difference between the U.S. and Canada as far as looking at mad cow disease –– the U.S. has got probably 50 times more cattle than Canada –- we both have the same background in feeding our animals –- and yet they are finding exponentially larger amounts of animals with mad cow disease than we are in the United States.
How long is it going to take for people to understand that the policy of the U.S. is not to find cases of mad cow disease?
I’m absolutely convinced that the government policy is don’t look, don’t find.

Happy Thanksgiving!
John Collins Rudolf