Animals were getting a bad rap last week. Not the marauding pit bulls that attacked a utility meter reader, and not the pet prairie dogs believed to have infected their owners with the monkeypox virus.
The new culprit is bovine and not just the late Canadian discovered with mad cow disease.
All ruminants-sheep, goats, camels, water buffalo and cattle in particular- may be responsible for contributing to global warming by emitting tons of methane, now the second-most important greenhouse gas (after carbon dioxide) in the atmosphere.
“I know it sounds crazy, but it’s a serious topic,” an article in the Los Angeles Times Saturday quotes Ralph Cicerone, an atmospheric scientist and chancellor at UC Irvine. “The population of beef and dairy cattle has grown so much that methane from cows now is big.”
Of course, it always was, if you had the misfortune to live near a feedlot.
In the United States-which conveniently pulled out of the 1997 Kyoto accord, leaving 180 other nations to do the heavy lifting-there are now two cows for every five people, most of them in California and Texas. So much for the all-hat-no-cattle description of some Texans.
Actually, it’s researchers at Washington State University who are taking the lead in experiments to analyze exactly what is emitted when bovines belch and what if anything can be done to mitigate its effect on global warming, short of turning us all into vegetarians.
Lucy, a 5-year-old Black Angus, is one of a few volunteers, or draftees, recruited for the experiment. She just does what normal cows do all over the world: she grazes, she swallows, she regurgitates partially digested grass, and she chews her cud, swallows again ad infinitum. All the while, Lucy burps into a tube attached to a canister hung from her neck.
Researchers, Analyze This.
We are told that with each chewing cycle, food is swilled in a 42-gallon mlange of fungi, protozoa and bacteria inside the rumen, the first of four stomachs in the cow’s complicated digestive system. Bacteria apparently turn the hydrogen in plant material into methane gas, a process called enteric fermentation. Now, we all know about fermentation from our individual research into beer, wine and spirits. This may be responsible for the “contented cow” theory. Elsie, the blitzed Borden Cow.
Actually, I once had a horse (he of no rumen, an uncomplicated, though flawed, digestive system) was free-fed a diet of ground alfalfa and molasses, which filled a 50-gallon drum placed near a 30-gallon water barrel in his stall. He would take a mouthful of water and dump it in the feed, let it soak awhile, then munch the mess. If we separated the feed from the water, he wouldn’t eat. Every three days or so, we added another bag of alfalfa molasses, which soon began to ferment. It reeked.
He loved it. I even caught him inhaling the fumes. He did not belch methane, but he had a very sunny disposition.
Anyway, the contented cows are belching methane into the atmosphere, affecting global climate change at least as much as all those SUVs. And while it would be easier to control carbon dioxide emissions, if only we had the will, scientists are sure to find a way to cut down the methane. Ranchers and dairy farmers aren’t so sure; though they would benefit if the 6 percent of food the cows eat wasn’t lost as methane.
Scientists say adding nitrogen-rich urea to the cow’s diet could lower emissions by 25 percent. A more ominous tactic would be to feed chlorinated hydrocarbons (like those found in gasoline). The logic of this escapes me, but it smacks of something proposed by scientists working for big oil. Another bright idea involves a vaccine to trigger the cow’s immune system to attack methane-causing microbes and a more benign plan by Canadian researchers to use a vegetable-oil supplement they say would cut methane by 15 percent. Is this like adding ethanol to gasoline? Farmers will find a way to get rid of all that corn.
Meanwhile, animal activists, currently campaigning against U.S. agriculture practices of crating veal calves and gestating sows to prevent almost all motion, may be gearing up to battle the gas research projects as inhumane. Lobbyists for the fast food industry will probably close ranks against depleting the cattle population.
Personally, I’m content with veggies and grains, but I think denying Bossie her fermentation would be really cruel.