Why Cows Are Stupid

We humans only want you for your milk, meat, and stupidity. Capricorn Studio/ shutterstock.com

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Be warned, this post is going to meander to its point, the stupidity of cows.

Let us begin with this observation: What distinguishes capitalist societies from pre-capitalist ones is the status of the home. In a capitalist society, the home is predominately about consumption, whereas in a pre-capitalist one, it is about both consumption and production. Some theorists believe that the success of capitalism, in its early stages, is not possible without first crippling the production functions of the home. The goal that all capitalists have in mind is to make labor more and more dependent on the market for the reproduction of their lives. Animals that can be eaten exit the domestic circle, as well as vegetable gardens.

I'm very sensitive to this distinction between capitalist and pre-capitalist forms of domesticity because the transition from one to the other was very apparent in the black African world of my childhood. My grandparents were the first in my family to be raised entirely in a wage-labor society. My great-grandmother is said to have seen the first white person in the history of my family. The Europeans introduced wage-labor to her and her society at the end of the 19th century. And this rapid economic transformation was identical to the one the Irish experienced in the 18th century.

Ireland, by the way, was the laboratory for capitalist imperialism. What happened to white peasants on that green island happened with little variations to black Africans on the golden veld: the dehumanization of the natives, the displacement of the home as the locus of production, and the appropriation of land on the grounds of improvement (making the land profitable, which is what "improve" originally means). Those who hold the opinion that racism would not be a part of our world if all humans were white will hit hard a sobering wall upon reading about the treatment of the Irish under English colonial rule.

I once saw a cow slaughtered at my grandmother's place. It was huge and black. It had so much blood. I watched the life slowly leave its marble-like eyes. My grandmother stood next me. Men chopped the beast to pieces. There were balancing rocks in the distance. This was a reservation in the Eastern Highlands of Zimbabwe. The Europeans had taken all of the good land and forced black Africans like my grandmother to live in places where things were hard to grow and animals difficult to raise. If you wanted to survive in these harsh places, you needed to find a job on the labor market. Still, there were remnants of the former self-sufficient, pre-capitalist home. There was my grandmother's little vegetable garden, the chicken coup, the occasional cow, and the occasionally slaughter of these animals. Cows have so much blood.

But watching the death of this cow did not affect me in the same way watching the death of a goat did in rural Maryland. The butchery of that goat, which I saw at age 11, was so traumatizing that, to this day, I can't eat the meat of that animal. But I do still consume steaks, roast beef, and hamburgers. Why did the cow's death, which I saw at age 13, not bother me at all? Because cows are so stupid. You only need to spend a day or two with them to see that almost nothing of interest happens between their fly-flapping ears. A goat, on the other hand, is a bright creature. Its eyes are alert. The thing thinks a lot.

For years, I thought cows deserved to be eaten because of their very low intelligence. I also thought this low intelligence had something to do with the bacteria in their gut: the greedy little microbes wanted the most perfect machine for their needs, one that saw and thought of little else in the universe than the grass on the ground. That way of thinking, however, came to an end immediately after I read this passage in the book Cowed, by Denis Hayes and Gail Boyer Hayes:



Scientists recently learned that regions of the cow genome that were unknowingly altered by early breeders included genes that—in the human genome—are linked to autism, mental retardation, and general brain development.



In short, cows are stupid not because of bacteria but. We made them that way. We selected them not only for their meat and milk but also for their docility. All of the smart cows are extinct.

But there is no such thing as a one-way street in evolution. If we changed cows, cows also changed us. The next question to ask is: What have all of these stupid cows made of us?