By Tom Magstadt

Cows are dumb, right?  Nothing like dogs or horses.
Oh sure, they’re useful.  "You never outgrow your need for milk."  Remember that one?  And "Beef, it's what's for dinner."
Cows don’t have a life.  They're just “what’s for dinner.”
And it’s a mighty good thing, too. Otherwise cattle growers in, say, the Nebraska midlands, where I lived for a time, or on the dusty, wind-blown plain that stretches between Garden City, Kan., and Pueblo, Colo., might be made to feel guilty for jamming thousands of cattle into filthy feedlots to "grow" before being shipped off to the nearest slaughter house.
Ever been to Dakota City, Neb., home of Tyson Foods' largest beef production plant? No offense, but it really stinks. Much the same could be said of Lexington, Neb., and my candidate for the worst named town in America – Garden City, Kan.
Allow me to digress.
Anyone who's serious about reforming Wall Street and Washington would do well to start by rewriting the rules governing corporate behavior. Big-bonus corporate bosses have mocked, modified and manipulated the rules for too long. Make them pay taxes at the maximum rate of 35 percent, not half that. Do away with all the gaping loopholes that work for them but not for the rest of us. And if they happen to be top management at Tyson or ConAgra make them live next to the putrid muck where the cattle live.
Animal welfare is not an issue for agro-industrial corporations liked Tyson Foods. Never has been. Never will be. Proximity and profit are the only considerations.  
Corporate cattle feeders provide the worst example of cruelty to animals on a mass scale I’ve ever seen, and I'm no stranger to farm life. I landed my first job as a hired hand on a farm when I was 13 years old.  
I grew up in a small South Dakota farm town about the size of Ridgway. The closest meatpacking plant – the only one within a hundred miles — was in Sioux Falls. Many years later, my oldest son, then a freshman in college, worked there — at Morrell’s — as a scab during a labor strike. Crossing a picket line is no fun. It was a terrible job but it paid well. There were no migrant workers — whether legal or illegal — willing to work in putrid conditions for low wages at that time.
The meatpacking industry has changed beyond recognition in the last 20 years. It has consolidated and moved its factories from the city to small towns throughout the Midwest from the Mississippi to the Rockies. In the 1980s, the top four beef companies controlled roughly 20 percent of the market; by 2001 they controlled well over 80 percent. It's ironic how big business ballyhoos about the "free market" all the time but secretly hates competition and conspires to destroy it.   
In 1995, after investigative journalist Eric Schlosser wrote a story about migrant workers in California, Rolling Stone magazine asked him to write about fast food in the United States. The upshot was his best-selling book, Fast Food Nation. In Lexington, Neb., a “Norman Rockwell-esque” town only a short drive from Kearney, where I lived, he “met Guatemalan Indians who barely spoke Spanish."
So what does Schlosser's story about slaughterhouses, migrant labor and the cruel plight of cattle raised in fetid feedlots have to do with the cow I call Crooked Horn? Readers may recall that I recently wrote about Crooked Horn, a cow with an attitude, in this space (Plaindealer, Sept. 22, 2011).
Crooked Horn, like most cattle in Ouray County, is lucky. She isn’t confined to a feedlot. It pleases the eye and soothes the soul to see cows grazing in the open meadows along the highways crisscrossing our bucolic countryside. Here's hoping we can keep it that way because there's more to life than money, money, money.       
Meanwhile, Crooked Horn is above it all — literally. In summer, she grazes up on the mountain where I live. She gives the lie to all the stereotypes about cows. It's true, she looks funny, with her absurdly bent horn, but she deserves to be taken seriously. She commands respect, and gets it — at least from the other cows.
And me.
Cows are big animals with gentle ways. They are uncommonly good and generous mothers, not only nurturing and protecting their own young, but also nourishing ours.
And yet, here's how the late great poet, Ogden Nash, taught us to think about cows:
"A cow is of the bovine ilk, one end is moo, the other milk."
As though there's nothing in-between. No beating heart, soul or sentience. In our relationship with cows, we take and they give. We don’t all own cows, but we all owe them.
We would never dream of treating our dogs or cats the way meat-factory farms treat pigs, chickens and turkeys — and, of course, cattle. Meat factories are a multi-billion dollar business. Some 80 percent of the pigs raised in the U.S. now come out of these so-called “Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations“ (an Orwellian sobriquet if ever there was one).
Crooked Horn has taught me — a self-confessed carnivore, gun owner and hunter — a good lesson. A lesson the Utes and other Native American tribes did not have to be taught and we have unlearned, namely that all animals big and small deserve our respect. Cows, perhaps, above all.