We went with Jessica's mother and stepfather Fred. It was our fourth year in a row.We went three years ago on Fred's 80th birthday. It was his first time ever going to a rodeo and he absolutely loved it, and we have gone every year since. Like last year, we attended the Sunday program, which has the finals of all of the events.
The drive is ridiculously short. The event complex, called Westworld, is just on the other side of Bell Road. I could easily walk there, but of course we drove and paid for parking. Inside we lingered in the outside hall before going into the area auditorium to take our seats. There one finds the vendors that are at every rodeo or western show, the vendors selling all manner of western clothes which are very impressive. There is something about the women wearing western wear---skirts and boots---that I find very appealing. I always look for cow prints. I love cow prints, whether it is on clothing or upholstery. I myself was wearing a print heavy cotton shirt as well as the "Rodeo Scottsdale" baseball hat I acquired several years back from one of the vendors. I thought it was as casual as could be, but this was enough to get a compliment from one of he women tending one of the stalls.
Walking through the stalls, I was reminded of my recent posts talking about pigs, and how pigs were my thing. I had a large "pig collection." I mentioned that at one point I switched to Team Cow. But it's not like I just switched one day. I outgrew my fascination with pigs when I got to be twelve or thirteen. I still have a lot of my pig collection, including the pig stuffed animals that my paternal grandmother made for me.
I think now how much delight I must have given her, and my mother, with my fascination with pigs. It was a thing that we could have fun with. Then one day I was not interested in that anymore. I think about this, how parents and grandparents (and other relatives) can have this fun connection with a child and then one day it is over. The child is not interested anymore, and soon may not even remember the fun bond that gave so much joy to their parent. That actually happened to me with my nieces. One day the way we used to play just became weird to them, and I knew that it was all over. It is the way of the world, as kids grow up.
I didn't join Team Cow until I was in my mid twenties in graduate school in Austin. It was mostly due to my ex-wife Laura, was my girlfriend at the time. She was from New York City and had lived there all her life. In Austin, we used to drive out into the countryside for fun and on one the early trips, she saw a cow and got very excited. A cow!
"Sure," I said. "It's a cow. What's the big deal?" But to her that was a novelty. This slowly turned into a fascination with all cows, and especially the live bovine mascot of the University of Texas Longhorns. We went to football games just to see the mascot, whose name is Bevo. My friend James, who went to UT at the same time I did, still lives in Austin and goes to the UT games. He sends me pictures of Bevo. Everyone loves Bevo now, in the age of social media. Once again I feel like a forerunner.
Now everyone who knows me knows I have been on Team Cow for years. When they were little, my twin nieces used to call me "Uncle Cowie." One of them still remembers all this, but with the other one, I get a mysterious blank stare when I mention it, as if it never happened. I loved being Uncle Cowie.
What about beef? Do I eat beef? Yes. Roast beef was my favorite thing as a child, and then steak became my favorite food.
How does that work if I am Team Cow? Because I am not a little boy anymore. I'm an adult.
But it's more than that. Years ago when I moved back to Colorado, I was driving north of Fort Collins in a county natural area where the gravel road passed through an open range area near the Wyoming border. Cattle there were roaming in a large herd without fencing along a section of the foothills.
Set away from the herd by several hundred yards, and standing on a small rise above the area beside the road, was the herd bull, standing motionless and surveying his domain. It was very dramatic to see that in a natural setting.
As I often do, while passing a herd of cattle, I rolled down my window in order to moo at the cows and see if I can get them to look at me. It's the same thing I used to do the pigs outside Ames when I was boy. I have a very good moo and I can often get cattle to turn their heads to look at me, and from time to time they will moo back at me, which is not easy to do.
On this particular day, as I did this, a young calf was near the fence. Delightfully, it started running up the car as if to greet me. I stopped driving, with my car idling. The calf stopped and looked up at me.
"How can you be so friendly to me?" I asked it. "Don't you know I am your predator? I might wind up eating you?"
But all I saw were these beautiful expectant eyes wanting to interact with me. At once it hit me:
Cattle love us.
You can look at this in a spiritual way, that cattle were created by God as a gift to us. Cattle are a manifest sign of God's love for humanity. It is one of those things that make me see the deficiencies in the Theory of Evolution as it formulated, namely in terms of a sequence random mutation events.
How could humanity exist without cattle? We could not be what we are without them. Yet what are the odds that a species like the cow would evolve randomly at the same time as human beings? It doesn't make sense to me.
The biggest awareness I gained, however, came through reasoned reflection. It is the awareness that thinking of cows as human beings with individual souls is false. Cattle live in the collective of their species. In this sense, becoming food for human beings was the best thing that ever happened to cattle. How many of these giant beasts would exist today if they were not food? They would be rare, only in zoos. Instead there are millions upon millions of cattle worldwide. All the folks who want us to stop eating beef basically want cattle to go extinct.
All of this is notwithstanding the need to treat cattle humanely, including the process of slaughter. To do otherwise is to violate the cosmic, and perhaps God-ordained, compact that we have with cattle.
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