It’s The Pitts: Keep It To Yourself

I keep hearing how the beef industry needs to use social media to be totally transparent about the way we produce beef. I couldn’t disagree more. 

Does a gastroenterologist explain everything they’ll do before giving you a colonoscopy? Do lab technicians write tell-all books about how they process urine or fecal samples? Do coroners have websites showing them performing an autopsy? Do politicians tell their constituents about all of their dirty little secrets? 

Of course not, and I can tell you from experience there are things we should keep to ourselves if we want to keep consumers eating beef.

For example, in the April issue of one of my favorite magazines, Gulf Coast Cattleman, there was a story titled “A Closer Look” which was a very graphic story about the chip business, and I’m not talking about computer chips. 

The story explained how ranchers should score their cows’ manure from one to five, with three being optimal – the perfect cow pie, if you will. 

Number five is like hard balls stacked on top of each other, while number one manure is jet propulsion feces coming out of a cow’s butt with “the consistency of cream soup.” 

The story included full-color pictures of each type of manure. 

Although the story was informative, I gotta say, after reading it I lost my appetite and couldn’t finish my lunch of Campbell’s Creamy Mushroom Soup. 

While this story was very apropos in a cattleman’s magazine, I’m not sure it’s something we should share in the New York Times or on YouTube. Should we use checkoff dollars to show examples of each kind of fecal matter in Good Housekeeping? Of course not.

Here’s another example which did not go over very well after I was asked by a female friend how I’d go about artificially inseminating a cow. 

I explained restraining the female bovine in a chute and how one’s arm is shoved into the rectum of a cow first to remove any manure, then reinserted to grab the cervix.

It was about this time my traumatized friend fainted. The last I heard, she’d become a vegan, joined a commune and was living in a yurt.

I’ll never forget the incident occurring on a United flight years ago.

As a writer, when I’m short on ideas, there are two things I can do guaranteed to give me inspiration – take a steamy, hot shower or fly on a commercial airliner. 

Baxter Black told me some of his best stuff was written on an airplane. 

Looking out at the clouds from a window seat always made me as calm as a cadaver in a casket and my creativity flowed freely, so I always used this time to write.

Naturally, I never encouraged conversation on an airplane, but there was one guy years ago in the middle seat who insisted on trying to converse with me.

He asked, “What do you do for a living?”

I explained I was a rancher, and he said he’d never met one before so he had several questions he was confused about – specifically the difference between a bull and a steer.

In an effort to curtail the conversation, I went into graphic detail about a couple ways to turn a bull into a steer. 

“First you throw the bull calf to the ground and either use a Callicrate Bander to apply a very tight band at the base of the bull’s scrotum, which would – over time – atrophy the bull’s testicles and they’d fall off,” I explained. “Or you can cut off the bottom one-third of the bull’s scrotum and pull on both spermatic cords then use a tool to crush the cords and cut off the testicles which we’d eat later for lunch.”

By this time, you could hear a pin drop in the 737 as those within ear shot were hanging on to every word. The women were nodding their heads up and down and cheering on the male’s emasculation, while the men were squirming in their seats and turning green in the gills. 

I learned from this experience if we’re gonna be totally transparent about everything we do in this business, always have the barf bag out of the seat pocket and available for use.