Buffalo and Cow

editor's introduction: Julie Lehman has written a provocative essay that could raise a challenge not only to friends of the livestock industry but also to wildlife advocates as well. She argues that we should take down some of the abstract barriers that have us see buffalo and cows as fundamentally different kinds of beings.

And once we start murdering buffalo in order to protect the ranchers' rights to cows whose selfhood has been utterly devalued, we begin to see that rather than being enemies, the cow and the buffalo have the solidarity of being pawns in a system which doesn't value either of them, except as property, or as obstacles to the maximizing of property.

The essay at its heart calls for us to see all beings - whatever they are - as beings in themselves. There are no purely natural or wild beings, no romanticized ideal. So, as wildlife advocates fight for the buffalo, they should be careful not to treat cows as merely an extension of the rancher, or the buffalo simply as an extension of wilderness. Instead, they and all beings should be considered victims of an entire system of abuse and therefore related to directly and experientially on their own terms.

That certainly goes beyond the familiar terms of the debate around Yellowstone buffalo. It's certainly worth considering and discussing.

Buffalo and Cow
by Julie Lehman

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Modern civilized human beings have a gift for rationalization and abstraction. Our relationship to both wild bison and domesticated cows is a perfect illustration of this phenomenon.

To many people, American buffalo represent the last dwindling remnants of an all but vanished wilderness. The whole concept of Yellowstone National Park, and of national parks in general, in reality is as far removed from true wilderness as are farms, ranches or cities. The buffalo living there today are no more "natural" than humans or cows or grass. Yet we cling to these romanticized notions and the rich particularities get lost in the shuffle. These particular creatures in this particular stretch of land becomes eclipsed by a notion of buffalo as representatives of the wild American West. We idealize a pure and insulated sense of a Wild that never really was. What they represent feels more real to us than what they are, which are beings like ourselves who sense and feel and belong to this planet.

Author Neil Evernden writes: "There is no such thing as Nature. There are simply other entities. We say the Native Americans and other indigenous peoples had a nice relationship with nature, but I suspect the reason they did is because they never had any "Nature". They had a cosmos, full of other beings, entities, others …. The belief in Nature becomes a danger when you begin to mistake your own abstract conceptions for things. You makes these ideas up, but you forget they're concepts."

There is nothing wrong with concepts, of course, but when they begin to replace tangible, individual experiences, that's where the danger comes in. When buffalo become concepts rather than living, breathing, excreting realities, then it is yourself and your projections you are having a relationship with, and not the buffalo themselves. When structure usurps content, generalities trump particulars, and categories reduce individuals to representations rather than complex beings, we all lose.

Similarly, when cows become mere symbols for us of the ranchers who are encroaching on buffalo habitat and destroying the wilderness, then we are not seeing the cows at all, rather we are weaving them into an over-simplified narrative of good and evil. Cows have been domesticated and taken out of their original context and are treated as bundles of meat to harvest and profit from. They are treated as livestock with no rights of their own. To believe that is to buy entirely into the mentality of the rancher. Cows are not this human-dreamt concept of their usefulness to us. There are as many ways of being a cow as there are of being a buffalo, or a human, or a forest. If we do not try to imagine how they experience the world, and are only concerned with them as negative symbols of mankind's degradation of nature, then we have become boxed and limited by civilization as surely as have those whom we consider our enemy.

The wild, then, is nothing if it is not beings encountering other beings with no Master Plans for the world and everything in it. We are beginning to escape our limitations when we can look at a cow and see that cow, in its struggles, its desires, its beingness, rather than seeing the concept of a cow, or the rancher's plans for that cow.

It is easy to see the buffalo and the cows as pitted against each other, but they are only pitted against each other for one reason: The human system in place has declared it to be so. They have said that buffalo are a threat to their livestock (with little to no evidence on this point) and that they are entitled to that livestock because they are making their living by mass breeding cows and profiting off their flesh. Therefore, this is a problem which must be managed by humans, the self-appointed CEO's of the planet. Some of the executioners carrying out these plans are the park rangers, following the orders of the government, which is beholden to the meat industry lobby.

Now, who are we to blame for this state of affairs? The ranchers? The park rangers? The government? The cows? Perhaps, it is easier to blame all the of these groups than to point at least part of the finger at ourselves. When we buy a hamburger, when we rage at the cows themselves, who are primary victims of this system, then we have not stepped outside of it enough to have a real grasp of all who are being affected and all that has been lost.

Why is a buffalo more romantic than a cow? I believe it is because our society has written the script that way; we have attached all sorts of meaning to that buffalo, we have associated them with the wide-open freedom that humanity has lost. Whereas, the cows are us--domestic, living within imposed parameters, dependent upon mechanization for their survival. Do we hate in them what we hate in ourselves? And yet, we have made their lives what they are. In effect, we have made the buffaloes' lives what they are too … their so-called freedom isn't so free after all, is it? We see this clearly when we see the price paid by the buffalo for ranging outside of the parameters we have set for them. We see that ultimately, thanks to us, they are no more wild and free than the cow. And, it's such an unbearably sad state of affairs … for the buffalo, cows, humans, and every other being whose world has been distorted and confined by the *Culture of Make Believe*.*

I have cried more than once over the cow mothers separated from their babies and the anguish this causes to both, over the "rape rack" female cows are subjected to in order to impregnate them, over the sick, cruel joke we have made of their lives. If their lives are nothing, how can our lives be anything? Once we begin to see other living, feeling creatures as existing solely for us, and once we deny their feelings and their experiences, we have fallen so far that there is not much left to lose. Any pretension we may have as to our ethical superiority becomes absurd.

And once we start murdering buffalo in order to protect the ranchers' rights to cows whose selfhood has been utterly devalued, we begin to see that rather than being enemies, the cow and the buffalo have the solidarity of being pawns in a system which doesn't value either of them, except as property, or as obstacles to the maximizing of property.

Clearly, then, the first step to breaking free of this system is to begin to value others as beings in their own right, and not simply as means to an ends, or as romanticized or demonized projections which have no reality outside our own minds.

The buffalo and the cow may never be free or wild or pristine, but at least we can attempt to perceive them and interact with them as valued and complex beings in a world of beings. Isn't that preferable to having plans for them, plans which favor some and deny others, and which fail to recognize these creatures' ideas about their own lives, independent of us?

Once we are willing to step out of the imaginary vacuums of ourselves, so much becomes possible. We may even find our grandest designs dwarfed by the messy, unquantifiable nature of all that is, or could be, when we learn to see ourselves as one of many, and glory in the experience.

***This phrase is inspired by Derrick Jensen's book of the same name.