I was thinking the other evening of cows. You say Why? I can't tell you.
But it came to me, all of a sudden, that cows lead hard lives. It takes
such a lot of grass, apparently, to keep a cow going that she has to
spend all her time eating, day in and day out. Dogs bounce around and
bark, horses caper, birds fly, also sing, while the cow looks on,
enviously, maybe, unable to join them. Cows may long for conversation or
prancing, for all that we know, but they can't spare the time. The
problem of nourishment takes every hour: a pause might be fatal. So they
go through life drearily eating, resentful and dumb. Their food is most
uninteresting, and is frequently covered with bugs; and their thoughts,
if they dwell on their hopeless careers, must be bitter.
[Illustration: If cows had time--]
In the old days, when huge and strange animals roamed through the world,
there was an era when great size was necessary, as a protection. All
creatures that could do so grew large. It was only thus they felt safe.
But as soon as they became large, the grass-eating creatures began to
have trouble, because of the fact that grass has a low nutritive value.
You take a dinosaur, for instance, who was sixty or seventy feet long.
Imagine what a hard task it must have been for him, every day, to get
enough grass down his throat to supply his vast body. Do you wonder
that, as scientists tell us, they died of exhaustion? Some starved to
death even while feverishly chewing their cud--the remoter parts of
their bodies fainting from famine while their fore-parts got fed.
This exasperating fate is what darkens the mind of the cow.