Cows Be Gone

It started in the 1990s, almost as a joke, a hamburger made out of plants. “Really, a vegetable burger? Who would eat such a thing,” asked most people. The years rolled by, efforts were made to better the vegetarian option and those improvements came in great strides.

The watershed moment came in 2024. It became widely regarded that the non-beef burgers were, surprisingly, not only delicious, but just too dang good to ignore. They were tastier and more nutritious than the old-fashioned burgers made from cows. The new variety of burgers were also kinder to the environment. These one-time curiosities had been elevated from a mere alternative to a preferred choice.

The paradigm shift didn’t happen straight away, to be sure. Some folks, those who had grown up on bovine burgers their entire lives, were not interested in such silliness as a vegetarian hamburger. A generation went by and the youths, not grown up on that solitary mindset, stopped buying beef patties. As if they were just biding their time until they controlled the majority of economic activity, then almost entirely across the board, this beef-free generation stopped buying actual beef. This would seem to be a relief to the unsuspecting cow, but wait, there’s more.

The price of beef plummeted to where it was no longer even possible to break even raising these animals on a ranch. Ranchers changed out to farmers setting their efforts instead to soybean, corn and assorted row crops. Even milk was no longer a profitable product. With so many non-dairy milk alternatives the market share for actual ‘cow juice’ gave away and never leveled off.

Then there was the leather industry. So many years of taking flack for employing animal parts for a capitalistic end had been guilt-tripped into making changes. The market for leather could no longer hold it’s own. With that ‘coup de gras’ the fate of the cow was sealed. 

Their numbers did more than dwindle. After only a single generation they had became the first domesticated animal to end up on the Endangered Species list. They became a rare sighting even driving through the vast open lands through Interstate 5 in California. A conservancy group eventually purchased the remaining 100 cows known to exist. They shipped the gentle lumbering beasts to Santa Catalina Island, one of the Channel Islands off the coast of Southern California. Heck, it worked for the bison, the board of the non-profit reasoned, preserving the cows should be an easy victory.

Cows and bison are different kinds of animals once introduced into the wild, even the ‘controlled wild,’ so it was found out. The bison, for example, was capable of living sustainably once people simply stopped shooting them and hacking them apart for various means. They could live well enough alone if they would just be left alone. Bison were imported to the island in the 1920s. The herd grew and their numbers became stable. Fact is, they flourished. So well did the herd that their numbers were occasionally pared down and repatriated to the mainland. The cow, however, had spent too long in captivity. Living even in the relative congenial wilds of the island, it turned out the cows experienced high anxiety. They couldn’t mate, or wouldn’t. It didn’t matter the reason, their dwindling continued. Yes, bulls were included in their numbers, but there weren’t any couplings. They wouldn’t and flat out stopped. Even the bulls were done. Or they were just too taken with the constant beautiful ocean view to consider the alluring curves of their fairer partners.

Predictably, there was never any overwhelming alarm when it became clear they would soon be extinct. After so many years and generations demonizing the poor unaware beast, what with its troubling off-gassing of methane and its unwitting contributions to global climate change, its required occupation of so many millions of square miles of earth just to be raised, killed and eaten, or turned into fashionable handbags. The newest generation had no more emotional connection to saving such a creature than if it were a cockroach skittering out from underneath a refrigerator. A nuisance. No more concern that if they were watching fossil-fuel vehicles lose market share to electric vehicles. ‘Hey, you can’t fight technology’ was the pertinent slogan of the time. So they didn’t, nobody did.

It was decided by consensus that the final ten beasts were finally to be slaughtered and barbecued in one final fatal fantastic outing. Entertainment included outdoor movies and live music, an all-day menu of barbecue entrees from breakfast through late into the night, a very fun day for the participants. The overriding sentiment from the evening was that they weren’t as good as fake beef, but they were good enough to eat. Until now, that is, when there were finally none left to eat.

[Loosely inspired by Jakub Rozalsi’s painting, ‘The Last Mermaid of the Northern Seas’. (https://twitter.com/mr_werewolf_art/status/1128983387535040512?s=20.) It got me thinking through a few ‘what if’ extinction-related scenarios. -klem]