I had this thought for a three-part story over dinner, and I’ve already written the first part. A snippet is here, and the rest of it is on Patreon (behind the paywall, alas). Check it out!
We should never have stopped using the cows.
I think it was cows. Maybe it was sheep? Couldn’t have been goats. No, goats are smart, you can tell they’re smart, I don’t think lots of people had goat herds in Europe. It was cows and sheep, and pigs behind the fences. Hey, you ever look at a pig? From the inside? There’s something in there, something we don’t like to think about about them and us. That’s why we love bacon and sausage and pork ribs, you know. The smell and the savor, they take us back. It’s always like a little taste of home.
Look, forget about the pigs, okay? The pigs aren’t important. We need to talk about the cows.
Okay, so back in the day, when everybody had chariots and spears and whatever, cows were wealth. They were money, before they had money. They were power, because if you had a lot of cows you were somebody special, you had the luck, you could tell people to do things and they’d do them. Why? I don’t know why. Humans are like that, okay? We’re this big bunch of monkeys and somebody has to be the one that decides where all the monkeys should go. So why not cows? Or, yeah, sheep — but we know it was really cows.