COW'S EYE VIEW

New Zealand Listener, Volume 14, Issue 357, 26 April 1946, Page 30

COW'S EYE VIEW

(Written for "The Listener" by DR.

MURIEL

BELL

Nutritionist to the Health Department)

ERE are some of the thoughts that may possibly go through the mind of a cow as she ruminates upon: men and affairs; assuming that she is a modern cow, acquainted with chemistry and agricultural science: "IT am the most efficient food-produc-ing machine on the pastoral farm---three times better than the hen, four times better than my brother. I eat a great deal of rough grass and produce buckets of smooth milk. I keep on turning out food for that parasite, man, who takes the milk that I intended for my calf. It used to puzzle him-and indeed it still does-what went on in my complicated set of four stomachs. He now knows a little about the team of micro-organisms that I keep in my rumen. They are allowed a brief life, and I hope a happy one, in the warm environment that I provide for them down there, but it is not without its benefits ‘to me, for they make a large quota of ‘the B-vitamins that I need for myself and my milk, and considering that I produce a good many pints a day, and that each pint contains about a fifth of man’s daily requirement of vitamin Bl and about half of his daily riboflavin needs, this team doesn’t do so badly. "These symbiotic friends of mine can also perform the miracle of converting such simple nitrogenous compounds as ammonium salts or urea into protein-

which is a thing that I could not do for myself. So it is really a good thing to give them a warm, if brief, home. — Of course it may appear a piece of ingratitude to swallow the protein they have made-because that is their fate. Putting it more explicitly, I swallow my friends and digest the protein which they have so cleverly built into their bodies. Alas! such is life. The same will happen to my brother, even sooner than to me. "The worst of it is that, even after my one-celled friends have toiled, and I have toiled (for there is a great deal of work entailed in biting, chewing, and then mixing and digesting the grass, and moving it through my very long alimentary canal) man shows his ignorance of the value of the protein and B vitamins that they have helped me to make, for he often throws away the skim milk that contains the protein and B vitamins; and why he should be so stupid as to put it into streams, I am at a loss to understand. It is enough to make a cow laugh, because it spoils his fishing into the bargain, and he seems to get a great deal of satisfaction out of that atavistic sport. I call him ‘homo sapiens’ with the same derision as he rudely refers to me as ‘a fair cow.’ It is time we took the bull by the horns and demanded equal food for equal sense and efficiency. No longer will I let him milk the flesh off my back and throw it into the stream."