One for the Ladies

~ This article first appeared in the Leader Vindicator newspaper. ~

Men get excited about a bull.  I’ve said it before:  Even the least masculine of male Homo sapiens, after just a few minutes in observance of a bull working a group of cows, begins to step with a little swagger, hitch up his pants, and spit.

Due to the bull’s aura, a leadership role is mentally assigned to males in a herd of cattle.  We structure all of our management decisions based on this mental pyramid: Bull on top, cows in the middle, calves on the bottom.  Management gets it wrong.

Breeding age males serve an obvious purpose.  But, in wild herds of herbivores including white-tailed deer, bighorn sheep, African elephants, and feral cattle, studs are mostly absent, spending their days in bachelor groups that are socially separated from the primary herd.  We must conclude that the leadership role is not on the shoulders of the biggest, badddest tough guy.

It’s usually his old mom in charge.

Large herbivores live in matrilines, meaning individuals associate with herds based on their mother, not father.  The well being of the entire herd hinges on the dominant female’s familiarity of the terrain in which the herd lives.  She’s usually the oldest, and retains memories of where to get water in drought or food in times of scarcity.  Her focused mission boosts survival and reproduction rates of relatives by transferring ecological knowledge to other females, who will eventually replace her and lead future generations.

Guess what we do with old females in the cattle business?  Sell them.  I’m a hawk; I pick out any female that doesn’t have a calf and get her off the property as quickly as possible.  Most of the time, she’s advanced in years.  It’s all about trying to stay in business, you know; feeding an ‘unproductive cow’ is expense without return, and the government extortionists will be at the door to detain my family and sell our beloved farm to developers if excessive overhead on my end prevents them from getting their cut of the goodies for doing absolutely nothing.

So the old cows go, mostly destined to become a two-for-$2 hamburger deal at a fast food joint, a meal that will make a fat kid a little fatter and give an angry vegan some extra fodder for their misdirected anti-meat monolog.

What a waste.

Matriarchs are a key that stockmen can use to completely alter production of meat, milk, and clothing.  There is no more ecologically sound food production model than herding livestock across a diverse landscape, yet farmers and ranchers have struggled to adopt such a strategy.  Livestock outside the fence display erratic behavior and often die from stupid mistakes, thus bolstering the opinion that animals are too dumb for their own good, and strong fence is the best way to take care of them.  What we fail to realize is the ‘dumb animals’ have been stripped of their social structure and then dropped into a foreign environment.  How smart would you look if you were plucked away from your family, mixed with strangers, and forced to survive as a group in a country you’ve never visited with natives who speak a different language?  Domesticated livestock are perpetually submerged in this reality.

The first step to altering livestock’s doomed trajectory is for human managers to adopt a culling program more favorable to older females.  Stockmen must take the time to allow social organization to develop in their herds and flocks, and then make an effort to bond with the leaders.  By forming a relationship with just a few prominent females, a herder can gain precise control of every animal in the group.

The next step is to give those animal societies a functioning environment to live in.  An overwhelming majority of pasture today is roughly the equivalent of being confined for life in your living room.  It does not matter how good of a family leader you are if your lifestyle limits you to the couch waiting for a food delivery.  Leadership skills will flourish, however, given space and resources to meet the needs of the community.  A matriarch must have the opportunity to become the landscape.  Human managers need to view property as a continuous whole and we need to lead the herd across every inch of that landscape.  The habitat will imprint on the cow’s memory, and she will never forget it.  If we stop destroying family structure with our management ideas, that perfect landscape imprint will pass through the herd for innumerable generations, and we’ll discover that animals aren’t as dumb as we think.

Our only hope in such a precarious business as food production is to transfer as much of the management responsibility from the checkbook onto the biophysical knowledge of a seasoned matriarch.  From this perspective, an old cow serves as the most important asset on a farm property.  Imagine the burden lifted from the economy when we stop trying so hard to eliminate herd organization and culture, choosing instead to allow those factors to work for us!

In conclusion, fellas, it’s ok to strut around the bull as though he’s a professional athlete and you’re looking for an autograph.  I’ll tell you what, though: It makes more sense to check out the girls.

Thanks, moms, for everything you do to raise up a family. You’re champions, every one.