Cow Chips

I bare sad news. Shambo is dead. The big boy passed on to another plane of existence sometime Thursday night. He will be missed at the temple of Skandla Vale near Llanpumsaint, Carmathen, where he was the sacred bull in a herd of about 50 sacred cows and bulls. His traumatic loss and the confrontation that produced it left religious scholars, historians and linguists pondering this cultural collision between the Sanskrit faith and the Welsh language, both of which had to be sort-of translated into English for the encounter to even happen. The resulting confusion may have been best summed up by an American observer who, though nominally an English speaker, pleaded, “I’m not even sure what the hell we’re talking about, here. Is the cow dead? Why is the cow dead? And, is this going to happen again?”
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The answer to the first question is, yes. The cow is definitely dead, depending on how you define death. And cow. But it only took about 30 Dyfed-Powys police constables to methodically work their way through the 100 pacifists who had sworn to protect their sacred bull, as evidently the cops anticipated a certain level of non-violence on the part of the devout believers, and the cops were proven correct. Hindus are so dependable.
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There were no rocks or bricks thrown at police as they used bolt cutters to snap the pad lock on the 8’ gate to the temple compound. Then, after shutting off Shambo’s “Moo Cam”, the cops led the six year old Friesian from his tastefully decorated pen onto a trailer, in which he was driven to his Samsara, followed for a short distance by unhappy, chanting harmless Hindu monks. Some hours later Shambo got the needle and became one with the universe, again.
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This confrontation had its roots in the 5570 BCE kidnapping of “Sita” by “King Ravana”, and then later, at The Battle of Lanka, when “Rama” joined forces with the monkey army and rescued her. This earlier encounter left a lot of bruised egos. And then, more recently, in April, Shambo tested positive for Bovine TB.
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Last year some 22,000 cows in Britain tested positive and they all immediately became “one with the universe” in order to hinder the spread of the “Mycobacterium bovis”, which is the scientific name for the tuberculosis that infects cows, and Welsh authorities saw no reason to harbor this particular four legged incubator for the bug, sacred though he might be.
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Britain used to bury about 2,500 people a year from tuberculosis, who caught it after drinking raw milk from the udders of cows infected by M. bovis. It’s a nasty and patient bacterium, taking perhaps as much as 15 years to kill the ruminant, but it doubles its population about every 12 hours, becoming infectious to humans and other cattle long before the original animal shows any signs of trouble.
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So the sacred cow, which was actually a sacred bull, is dead, and for good reason. But what about of the religious implications of Shambo’s termination? Well, as the Hindu philosopher Carvaka wrote, in his creation of “atheistic materialism “, “While life is yours, live joyously. None can escape Death’s searching eye. For once this frame of ours they burn, how shall it ever again return.” Which leads me to the only Hindu joke I know; the believers in dvaita may wish to taste the sugar, but the followers of Advaita wish to become the sugar.
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And, again, I’m still not sure what the hell we are talking about.
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