Cattle Quotes

“I found most of my friends quite content to be used as tax-material, even though the sums of money taken from them were employed against their own beliefs and interests. They had lived so long under the system of using others, and then in their turn being used by them, that they were like hypnotized subjects, and looked on this subjecting and using of each other as a part of the necessary and even Providential order of things. The great machine had taken possession of their souls.”
― Auberon Herbert

“Mood’s a thing for cattle or for making love. You fight when the necessity arises, no matter your mood.”
― Frank Herbert, Dune

“Escherichia colia O157:H7 is a relatively new strain of the common intestinal bacteria (no one had seen it before 1980) that thrives in feedlot cattle, 40 percent of which carry it in their gut. Ingesting as few as ten of these microbes can cause a fatal infection; they produce a toxin that destroys human kidneys.”
― Michael Pollan, The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals

“So this is what commodity corn can do to a cow: industrialize the miracle of nature that is a ruminant, taking this sunlight- and prairie grass-powered organism and turning it into the last thing we need: another fossil fuel machine. This one, however, is able to suffer. ”
― Michael Pollan, The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals

“In the two days since Brac had discovered the fishing hole, he'd spent practically every waking moment with a rod in his hand.”
― Carol Lynne, Shooting Star

“An image suddenly loomed in his mind: the greenhouse effect. Yes. The Earth is a gigantic greenhouse. With us planted here millions of years ago by aliens. Soon they’ll be back for the harvest.”
― John Ajvide Lindqvist, Handling the Undead

“Even a little practical working familiarity with cattle goes a long way in Africa, but how many international relations studies include this?”
― T.K. Naliaka

“When the longhorns could be gathered up and driven, it was theorized that the heat from the herd's mass attracted lightning. (Such was the radiant heat from a large herd that a cowboy's face would be blistered on whichever side of the herd he'd ridden by the day's end.) Their great horns also seemed to attract electricity, so that lightning and ground-electricity would bounce around from horn to horn throughout the herd - a phantasmagoric burning blue circuitry. The cracking of the cowboy's whips and the twitching of the cattle's tails also emitted sparkling "snakes of fire.”
― Rick Bass, The New Wolves: The Return of the Mexican Wolf to the American Southwest

“Grass fed meat is an environmental nightmare perpetuated by elitists who refuse to change their eating habits.”
― Lisa Kemmerer, Eating Earth: Environmental Ethics and Dietary Choice

“Everything I thought about cows as an Easterner-come-west is wrong. They are not symbols of a noble culture of mounted herdsmen. They are not cute. They are an invasive species, Bos Taurus, a water-loving European animal not fit for arid climates, and their cancer-like effects on the land have not ceased.”
― Christopher Ketcham, This Land: How Cowboys, Capitalism, and Corruption are Ruining the American West

“Animals arrive at slaughter exhausted, thirsty, hungry, and terrified. Every year 100,000 factory farmed cattle arrive at slaughter injured, or too dispirited to walk; undercover investigators have repeatedly
documented downed animals who are kicked, beaten, pushed with bulldozers, and dragged from transport trucks with ropes or a chain, though they are fully conscious, in pain, and bellowing pitifully. Cows exploited in the dairy industry, because they are older and their bodies have been exhausted by perpetual pregnancy, birthing, and milking, are among the most pathetic when they arrive at slaughter.”
― Lisa Kemmerer, Speaking Up for Animals: An Anthology of Women's Voices

“They don't have the time to take on animals with dietary restrictions and missing legs."
"Do you think I don't know that? That's precisely why they're all here with me. No one else would take them. Angus, for example." She moved toward the Highland steer. "Some foolish merchant traveled to Scotland on holiday and decided to bring his wife a pet calf from the Highlands. Never stopped to think about the fact that he would grow."
"Surely people aren't that stupid."
"Oh, it happens all the time. But usually they make that mistake with pups or ponies. Not cattle." She shook her head. "They dehorned him in the worst, most painful way. When he came to me, the poor dear's wounds were infected. Infested, too. He could have perished from the fly-strike alone. That man was stupid, indeed. The only thing he got right was his choice of calf. Angus is exceedingly adorable."
Adorable?
Gabe eyed the beast. The animal stood as tall as Gabe's shoulder, and it smelled... the way cattle smell. Shaggy red fur covered its eyes like a blindfold, and its black, spongy nose glistened.”
― Tessa Dare, The Wallflower Wager

“Public grazing provides just one dollar out of every $2,500 of taxable income in the West, or 0.04 percent, and just one out of everything 1,400 jobs, or 0.07 percent. On both public and private lands in the eleven Western states, the livestock industry accounts for less than 0.5 percent of all income.”
― Christopher Ketcham, This Land: How Cowboys, Capitalism, and Corruption are Ruining the American West

“The argument goes like this: even if public grazing contributes almost nothing to local economies and national food production, it nonetheless supports "an important western lifestyle and the rural west's social and cultural fabric." If we keep ranchers working on the range, on the big wide-open of the public domain, we ensure the historical continuity of a "custom" that has gone on for close to 150 years.”
― Christopher Ketcham, This Land: How Cowboys, Capitalism, and Corruption are Ruining the American West

“The top 10 percent of grazing-permit holders on federal lands own 50 percent of all livestock on those lands; the bottom 50 percent own just 5 percent.”
― Christopher Ketcham, This Land: How Cowboys, Capitalism, and Corruption are Ruining the American West

“Pound for pound, these animals don’t add up to much. Dog fanciers with a couple of Rottweilers trump us in terms of sheer biomass. But, when it comes to sheer insistence, even the largest, most unruly dogs—or for that matter, your average herd of cattle—are no match for our ducks, geese, parrots, parakeets, turkeys, cats, rabbits, and other birds.”
― Bob Tarte, Enslaved by Ducks

“Politics is a lot like walking through a feedlot in springtime: it's slow going and you're constantly surrounded by crap.”
― Kristi Noem, Not My First Rodeo: Lessons from the Heartland

“We are duck farmers. We are The Overlooked. The most glamorous type of farmer is the cattle rancher, because they were made famous by cowboys. But people forget the humble duck farmer, and last time I checked, cows don’t lay eggs needed to bake superior cakes.”
― Jarod Kintz, World Farming Championship

“They walked gingerly across the junk-filled vacant lots to the local abattoir - a place of infinite fascination, with its strange sights and stranger smells.

It was a thrill - because it outraged their every sense of animal love - to watch the killings. To see calm, innocent cattle led one by one into that room with the fetid smells and the stained, concrete floor always a'swish with running water. To see brawny, heavy-set Gus Milner and his equally big son, Charley, slip the snubbing rope through the ring in the cow's nose, and relentlessly draw its head down and down until its nose touched the heavy ring set in the floor, then fasten it.

Their hearts did strange nip-ups just back of their mouths as one of the men would pick up the heavy sledge, and with one great, perfectly aimed blow, strike the animal just between and a bit above the eyes. They always jumped at the sudden slump as the carcass dropped, spraddled and lifeless, to the floor.

("The Shed")”
― E. Everett Evans, Zacherley's Vulture Stew

“Cattle and metal treasure were the main forms of wealth in ancient Ireland—metal because it was rare, and cattle because they were useful. Cattle provided milk to drink and to make into cheese, and hide and meat after they were dead. If a king demanded tribute from his subjects, it would probably be in the form of cattle—in fact, a wealthy farmer was called a bóiare, or “lord of cows.” In the famous poem Táin Bó Cuailnge, a major war starts because Queen Mebd discovers that her husband has one more bull than she does. Celtic chieftains spent quite a bit of their energy stealing cattle from one another. They even had a special word for this activity, táin. (Cattle raiding wasn’t just an amusement for the ancient Irish; modern Irish people were stealing one another’s cattle well into the twentieth century.)”
― Ryan Hackney, 101 Things You Didn't Know About Irish History: The People, Places, Culture, and Tradition of the Emerald Isle

“He who could not find plow-oxen owns cattle.”
― Miriam Lichtheim, Ancient Egyptian Literature, Volume I: The Old and Middle Kingdoms

“Grass-fed cattle create more greenhouse gases (50–60% more methane) than grain-fed cattle.”
― Lisa Kemmerer, Eating Earth: Environmental Ethics and Dietary Choice

“An intelligent and industrious crofter was proud to show our commissioner a cart of his own particular invention, and which, though furnished with what is proverbially regarded as a superfluity in the shape of of a 'third wheel', seemed exceedingly well adapted to its purpose. It was in use at the time for the purpose of driving home turnips from the field, the team consisting of the owner's two cows; and a more tractable or docile team it would have been difficult to imagine, indeed the assurance was given by a neighbour that not only did they obey their owner readily and efficiently in the draught, but that one of them, in particular, would come from the most distant part of the holding whenever he chose to call and wave his hat as a signal that her presence was wanted for business!”
― William Alexander, Rural life in Victorian Aberdeenshire