Anyone caught eating or drinking or even ordering an animal-based product was given a life sentence of listening to William Shatner cover "Stairway to Heaven."
Cattle, now free to roam where the deer and the buffalo roam, posed some problems.
What to do with America's 96 million cattle, 10 million of which were dairy cows, 32 million beef cattle, plus millions of mixed breed (cattle mutts who produced sour milk and bland, stringy beef), homeless, or Spanish-mooing cattle that had illegally crossed over our porous southern border.
A quick clarification for city people: "Cattle" is the fussy, accurate term for domesticated bovines. A "cow" is an adult female, hence "dairy cow."
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| A dairy cow |
At cocktail parties, wedding and divorce receptions, and workplace meet'n'greets, however, it's acceptable to call "cattle" "cows." No one is likely to correct you and, if they do, you have a flesh-and-blood definition of "pedant."
A "heifer," 20th-century rural slang for "gal," is a female bovine who has likely not had sex yet.
A "steer" is a male who will never have sex, nor want to, and therefore will not harass cows. Steers were highly prized back in humanity's omnivore days because their lack of testosterone made their meat more tasty than bulls' whose only job in life is to have sex.
Just hours after the Great Cattle Liberation (GCL), the NRA, which had suffered setbacks during the two previous decades, picked up the scent of a potential resurrection, arriving at this syllogism: "We don't need more cattle. Bulls make more cattle. Therefore, someone is gonna have to shoot bulls."
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| This guy's totally gonna get shot. |
Once that idea entered Earth's atmosphere, hunters (and mass shooters) raced from the shadows. They firmly believed, as they always have, that if wild animals aren't "harvested" or "culled," they were destined to die a more awful death, e.g., starvation, wolf and wildcat mauling, mad cow disorder, etc.
Hunting was an act of compassion!
Killing can be both fun and humane! "Eat hot lead, Mama Deer! You'll never fear starvation again! I'm doing this for you! God, I love this!"
So the rejuvenated NRA went to work buying congresspersons in order to legalize bull hunting (with the option of eventually adding homeless and illegal immigrant cattle to the death list).
We will spare the reader the details of this lengthy, boring process, laced with legalities and lies, propaganda, trumpian campaign rallies, "Kill More Bull" red caps, rushed construction of assault weapon factories, and hastily passed legislation to build even higher and thicker walls around schools to Keep Our Children Safe.
Surprisingly, many gun-toting Americans lobbied for some restrictions on bull hunting.
Maybe, for example, hunters should use only .22 rifles with their puny little bullets (no hollow points!) so the killing process would take longer (bull scholars claim it can take as many as eleven .22 bullets, all entering either the heart or brain area, to kill a healthy bull), extending the hunters' pleasure, and making mass shootings waaay more difficult for our fellow citizens who enjoy such things.
The NRA's first-draft proposition -- called Fish-in-a-Barrell Easy Access -- was to leave the bulls in their respective home pastures so hunters would have fewer miles to drive their gas-gobbling F-350s and SUVs.
They'd just drive to ol' Farmer John's ranch, pull up to the fence, walk out amongst the now lonely and horny (not in that way) bulls, and fire away, trying their dead level best not to "do a Dick Cheney."
PETA and normal animal lovers protested immediately, and, as usual, they were ignored immediately.
Some of the Czar's more liberal advisers convinced him to open the gates, give the cattle two weeks to find a welcoming environment, then start bull-hunting season.
The NRA convinced the Czar (by requesting it) to allow hunters to use AR-15s on bulls weighing over a ton.
And so began the DBS (Domesticated Bovine Solution), but it was only the beginning.
Even with a bull hunting season, too many cattle continued to roam the earth, their farts discharging a tsunami of deadly methane.
This moved the Department of Interior to implement two additional plans: One, transport wolves on Airbus A380s (each of which provided first-class seating for 860 wolves; snacks: sedated rabbits; entrees: roadkill "steak") to cattle-rich areas of the country. The Czar saw this as a win-win effort: restock this Great Nation's dwindling wolf demographic and "cull" or "harvest" millions of cattle.
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| Wolf transporter |
Two, market cattle -- esp.calves and heifers -- as pets for the very rich (they would have to be spayed or neutered, of course) (the calves and heifers, not the very rich) (even though spaying and neutering the very rich is well worth considering).
This plan caught on immediately. By 2040, you couldn't enter a wealthy person's home without bumping into a heifer, often clothed in playful anthropomorphic wardrobes -- Disney characters, Darth Vader, Sean Hannity, Santa Claus, etc.
The more humane among the very rich allowed their pets to enjoy some outside time, ruminating and chewing cud next to the pool, and using their ever-swishing tails to chase flies from their poop patties. (The pet cattle's fragrant droppings also created minimum-wage jobs for Mexicans who flew over the trumpian Wall in high-tech drones invented for just that purpose in 2020.) (The Mexicans could boost their income by emptying the very rich's massive Purina Bovine Boxes into which house cows shat).
Finally, the move to Veganism resulted in a new Cabinet Department: The Department of Separation of All Religions Except Fundamentalist Evangelical Literalist Christianity from the State, initially chaired by Franklin Graham, Jr.
This Department easily convinced the Czar (by asking him) to retain enough cattle for "those kind of Christians" to offer up as sacrifices to their carnivorous Lord as per instructions in Leviticus and the like.
Graham, always meticulous in his calculations, made certain that the cattle population (his "Bullpen," as he called it) was bountiful enough that very rich Christians could match King Solomon's record-setting 20,002 cattle he burnt as a peace offering to the Lord once Solomon's immigrants completed The Temple's construction (We're not making this up. See 1 Kings 8:63).
By now, many readers must be wondering, "What about pigs? And what's the difference between a pig and a hog?"
The first question is easily answered: The Reverend Graham had Exorcist-in-Chief Brother Siegfried Thompson cast out all the demons residing in Sarah Sanders, Stephen Miller, Mitch McConnell, and in the entire wicked brood of indicted trump associates, and when the demons were liberated, lo and behold, they entered into every pig and hog that oinked upon the earth's surface -- there were that many demons! -- and the swine were sore afraid and leapt into the Grand Canyon where they died immediately. (There's a precedent for the pigs' -- or hogs' -- behavior: Matthew 8:28-34)
As for the pig-hog question, that must wait for another day.
I'm amazed by the number of bulls you managed to take by the horns here! b
ReplyDeleteI kept losing my focus!
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