Bone
Meals
The Royal Association of Mad-Cow Surgeons(RAMS),a Banbury, England-based
research council funded by the Better British Beef Council (BBBC) or 3BC,
has finally published its long-awaited report on the causes of the mad cow
scare that precipitated the slaughter of the entire British herd except one
cow and bull left for breeding purposes--and one steer to watch.
Chief RAMS spokesperson Dr. Geoffrey Hogg, an ex-minister of agriculture
who insisted his family eat beef during the worst of the scare, said the
report “puts the final nail in the coffin of those speculators who blame
beef for everything from hangnails to gout. This study will send those
worry-mongers packing so they can devote their full energies to the burning
hectares of genetically modified corn in Surrey being tested to save the
starving masses of Ethiopians.”
The study is certainly impressive in its dimensions, weighing in at one
kilogram and consisting of 1,031 pages. Titled “The Facts Behind the Myth
of Mad Cow Disease.,” the study traces the origin of the disease back to
the battle of Waterloo. Apparently after that battle, British soldiers
brought bones from the Waterloo dead--nationality didn’t matter--and ground
them up into first-class bone meal that was used throughout Britain but
particularly in Yorkshire where the soil lacked minerals and the people
were becoming increasingly short and squat. The report, citing crude
military reports that suggested conscripts from Yorkshire on average were
5.75 centimeters shorter than conscripts from Kent, surmises that Yorkshire
officials, fearful of losing its heralded rugby title, made a conscious
effort to improve the mineral content of the land. DNA analysis of bones
discarded in hedgerows and in well-preserved cans of chicken soup, indicate
that French bones appear to be in the majority--67.3%, according to the
study.
The strategy apparently worked for the report suggests that within three
generations people from the north of England were not only taller and
heavier than their counterparts in the south but they tended to score, on
average 17 points higher on the Stanford-Binet IQ test. Because its
essentially a medical report, authors of the study can only speculate that
this practice of using human bones as fertilizer contributed to Yorkshire
producing such giants of literature as Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, Byron
and Shakespeare. “There is enough evidence to shows that pockets of genius
can be found around battlefields, graveyards, and crematoriums. This need
further research. But no country is immune from this salutary effect of
war, famine and pestilence. There is a reason Germany and Russian produce
so many staggering geniuses.”
Dr. Hogg remarked at a Banbury news conference there is good evidence that,
“once people in the north of England realized that soil enriched with human
bones could produce better rugby players, all human remains somehow found
their way into farmland. Jonathan Swift gently satirizes this practice in
Gulliver’s Travels. And Swift’s pamphlet, “A Modest Proposal,” which is
ostensibly about eating infants, is really a satire of the accepted
practice of fertilizing land with arms, legs and genitals. A very pagan
practice, really.”
The cow report suggests that the above practice, which by the 18th century
was widespread throughout Britain and Europe, was not especially harmful
because human bones were always made into bone meal, though there was an
occasional incident of a farmer throwing thigh bones on his fields and
praying for rain. The soil, as a chemical screen, countered any pathogens
that might be in the human bones, and rendered them harmless.
In time, of course, ruminants such as cows consumed the grasses and legumes
grown under these circumstances, thus taking such some of the human genetic
sequence. Hogg remarked half in jest that there “have been long-standing
jokes in the north of England the cows look a lot like their owners. Well,
we might finally know why.”
The report suggests that as long as there was this “symbiotic relationship
between cow and man--I eat you, you eat me--there were no known cases of
mad cow disease. Only when religious and social mores--and funeral home
operators--put a stop to this practices did we find something amiss in the
food chain. When bone meal applied to farmland and in feed came from other
cows, road kill or veterinarian offices, we notice cases of the “wobblies.”
We think this was the beginning of mad cow disease.”
The report suggests that, once cows started “eating themselves, instead of
eating the people who would be eating them, genetic deterioration began.
This was a kind of inbreeding but worse. Not only did you have sex with
family members, you eat them as well. So, in a way, mad cow disease has its
roots in cow cannibalism.
“Destroying the British dairy herd will forestall the disease, not
eradicate it. The solution is to rebuild the human/cow connection, to put a
little man in the cow’s meal. Over time we might want to return to the
practice of spreading bones of all the dead on farm field, perhaps adding a
tax incentive for surviving family members. After all, this is much more
ethical than keeping the old man in an urn on the mantle.”
Another suggestion, supported by BBBC, is to give every cow a “human” pill
at birth, a concoction consisting of blood plasma, hair, saliva, and bone
shavings. Such a practice is considered the quickest way to bring man and
cow into the right and proper ethical relationship.
RAMS spokesman Dr. Hogg acknowledges that there might be some resistance to
this last alternative because it’s not painless for people to provide bone
shavings. And RAMS does not want to be responsible for encouraging a black
market in contraband bones. Hogg is hopeful that in time arms and legs will
be grown in petrie dishes.
Until then, he concludes, “Every Englishman should do his part.”
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