Why You Should Eat Yak Instead of Beef

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Wed Sep-28-11 07:20 AM
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Why You Should Eat Yak Instead of Beef

from truthdig:

Why You Should Eat Yak Instead of Beef

Posted on Sep 27, 2011
By Christopher Ketcham

I first comprehended the awfulness of the ranching industry when the cows of Moonlight Meadows, high in the La Sal Mountains of Utah, surrounded me and began shitting. They had been trucked in from the canyons of the lowland desert countryside, near the town of Moab, to graze summer long on the free grass in the mountains—public grass, as this was land protected in trust for the American people by the federal government, under the auspices of the U.S. Forest Service. But none of it was much protected; the feces were the visceral evidence of this.

Along the trail the cows had laid big diarrheal pies, ice slippery, landmine-like, which splashed onto socks, legs and shorts. Where the trail steepened, the shit was treacherous. Soon I was surfing in it and finally was thrown like a clown on a banana peel. I lay there feeling stupid and looked around at the hundreds of cattle in the field nearby, one of many herds strewn in the mountains. A mother turned her ass to me and fired a big green load of diarrhea. Another cow pissed in an arc like a fire hose.

The cows evacuated thus onto the land and into the air, sometimes onto one another’s backs and into eyes, the shit where it had dried swirling in dust devils when the wind kicked up and where it was sloppy and wet running in streams, in puddles, in steaming black pools. The stench was ammoniacal, sulfurous, and as I lay there in my dung-splash wallow, it was, quite suddenly, an unbearable experience: not just the smell of bowels evacuating, of creatures destined for the slaughterhouse as death on the hoof, but the cultural and political travesty it represented, the ecocidal meaning of it.

Cows are terribly destructive creatures, especially in arid climates. Livestock are considered by a quorum of scientists as the No. 1 cause of species extinction, topsoil loss, deforestation and desertification in the American West. They muck or stomp or gorge out of existence streams, whole watersheds, rare grasses and shrubs, entire ecosystems in micro. Their big heavy hooves trample the soil, eroding it often beyond repair. Just as the cow is an invasive species, an exotic in the West—an import of Spanish missionaries in the 16th century—it brings invasive weeds that triumph in its midst: the water-greedy tamarisk, for example, along with the greedier Russian olive and the useless Russian thistle, better known as tumbleweed. A 1998 study from the Journal of Arid Environments found that a hundred years of livestock grazing on public lands near the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico was more damaging in terms of long-term development and recovery of flora than multiple nuclear bomb blasts. ............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/why_you_should_eat_yak_instead_of_beef_20110927/