An Amazing Oversight

It's no secret that everything is going to pot these days. Pick up a newspaper or magazine, turn on your TV set, listen to the radio ---- pollution, crime, drugs, inflation, strikes, artificial additives to our food, and so on and on.

Physicists tell us that to every action there is an equal and positive re-action. So we have anti-pollution groups, anti-crime, anti-drug, anti-strike, and natural food organizations. Like all good citizens of our great democracy, I heartily approve of these organizations.........provided, of course, that they don't affect my standard of living.

Yes, it is our duty to be anti-something, but we should be consistent, don't you agree? I am thinking in particular of those good folks who are getting more recruits to their ranks every day, to wit: the Natural Food People. It is to these fine citizens that I am about to reveal my dread secret, which has hitherto been kept in darkness by who knows what sinister interests. The secret is this:

ALL OF OUR DAIRY PRODUCE, AND MOST OF OUR BEEF, IS PRODUCED AS A RESULT OF ARTIFICIAL INSEMINATION !!!

There, I have brought it out into the open at last. Ralph Nader, Rachel Carson, move over. Nobel Prize Committee, take note. As for the Society of Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, where have you been? Laying down on the job, it seems to me. There is some excuse for the Natural Food people, because most of them never lived on a farm, or have the slightest idea of the food-growing business.

It is quite useless for the SPCA to plead innocence, because today everybody has heard about sex. Every magazine worth its salt has at least one article on the subject in every issue, not excluding that quintessence of family magazines, the Reader's Digest. Even the Pope in Rome has come out in favor of natural sex, within the guidelines he and the other celibates in the Curia have set, of course.

It is therefore amazing to me that hitherto, no one besides myself has raised their voice against this cruel and unnatural development. How can the SPCA people sleep at night, without seeing the millions of reproachful eyes of the bulls done out of their livelihood?

Why have the Natural Food enthusiasts not taken to the streets and to the halls of the legislatures to protest against this "artificial" business?

The above-mentioned organizations are powerful, I admit, but I believe that things have come to such a pass that we need all the help available to reverse the modern practises. Therefore, I appeal to the Womens' Liberation Movement for their powerful support!

No, I am not naive enough to believe that Womens' Lib would be concerned with the fate of our bulls, far from it. But surely they would be interested in the state of the feminine gender of the species Bovus; she has been called, and rightly so, the Foster-Mother of the human race. Such being the case, would it not be too much to expect that Womens' Lib would not be concerned that their Foster-Mother never sees her mate, or even feels his caress? Females have their rights too, you know.

And when the men wake up - if they wake up, before it is too late - and found their own Mens' Liberation Movement, will they not take note that the very symbol of masculinity, the bull, is denied his rights? Don't they realize that instead of a harem of forty to fifty wives, the 1975 bull never has the opportunity (to make use of the modern euphemism) to make love in the natural manner?

The farm boy, after many struggles, pulling and being pulled by a half-ton of hysterical cow at the opposite end of a twenty-foot rope, learned many things. Especially after they reached the residence of the bull.

There are no doubt many successful men ---- captains of industry, top-ranking bureaucrats, doctors, writers, even poets............. who bear the scars of Taking-Cow-To-Bull Day on their bodies. This proves, by the best theological reasoning, that this chore was a great character-builder, now alas, denied to the youth of today.

What is the situation nowadays? We see the modern farm boy lolling in the seat of his father's thirty thousand dollar tractor with air-conditioned, sound-proofed cab, listening to the hit parade as broadcast eternally by the local pop radio station.

And the modern cow? She is attended to by a veterinarian in a white coat, wearing surgical gloves, carrying thermometers, phials and other unmentionable equipment. Not one shred of romance in the whole business.

As I said at the beginning, everything is going to rack and ruin, the younger generation in particular. Other philosophically-minded commentators have noticed this too, since before Socrates'  time. The trouble with them, is, they haven't mentioned specific instances, as I have done. I've said my piece; now it's your turn.