Holy Cow

[Gauracandra]

There is a program on PBS (Public Broadcasting) called Holy Cow. It looks at the impact of cows on our worldwide culture. I've seen it before. Its pretty good. Except when it goes into looking at cows for meat, or like an African tribe that drinks their milk, and then cuts them and drinks their blood. Those points are really, Really gross.

 

The cow is something very peculiar if you think about it in terms of the Bhagavatam. In the Srimad Bhagavatam it predicts as a sign for Kali Yuga the abuse and slaughter of cows. Why not some other animal? Now that is a very odd sort of prediction. There is no reason to think why some person living in a village in India thousands of years ago should see cow slaughter as becoming rampant. For one thing, it wouldn't have been rampant in India at the time, and if it occured outside of India (say Europe) it certainly wouldn't have taken on an industrial scale thousands of years ago.

 

Yet today we see it is such a huge portion of the world food market and economy. In fact, one of the biggest cause of loss of rain forest is due to cutting down trees in Brazil to create grazing land for beef cattle.

[Gauracandra]

The program really shows how in the last 50 years American diets have changed to have the mass slaughter. They mentioned that the cattle ranches feed the cows lots of corn which fattens them up but also is unhealthy for them. Because of this they give US cows about 3.7 million pounds of anti-biotics, over 1 million pounds more than given to American people.

 

The point out that the strength of the cow was always that it could eat grass on freeland and convert it into milk. This meant that a person living out in the country could let their cows roam and graze and convert something they can't eat (grass) into something they can use - milk. Industrialization has changed all that since most people live in the city and can't possibly get milk by letting their cows graze. There is no freeland in the city. Once, just 70 years ago perhaps about 50% of the country lived and worked on farms. Then the agricultural products were cheapend by mechanization that the family farmer couldn't compete and so was run out of business. They moved into the cities, and the industrial food industry was born.

[protectacow]

by chance i got to see the show, very nice.

 

at the end the narator said something like "our human civilization owes very much to the humble mother cow"

 

some more that i remember......"it is a miracle that the mother cow can eat almost anything and turn that into very nutritcious Milk"

 

"the Cow is the first animal to domesticate man"

[Kulapavana]

I saw it too. Seems like these people realize the immense value of the cow, yet their approach is purely exploitative, just like with everything else. They do not see themselves as being indebted to the cow for using her milk. In Kali yuga the notion of honorable living is gone. Most of the modern world is living far below the nobility standards of even the American Indians, let alone Vedic civilization.