The Point at which you conclude that regulation has gone too far...

As I was quickly reading through the news headlines this morning, one headline caught my eye.  You can read about it by clicking the link below:  White House looks to regulate cow farts

I shook my head in disbelief.  This can't be real, can it?  Well, sometimes truth can be stranger than fiction. Coincidentally, the blog post two days ago was about the 'emissions' of our cows and now, low and behold, our government is getting serious on reducing those emissions.  The current Administration is planning on making the Dairy industry reduce the methane emissions of its cows by 25% by 2020.  Here is a quote from that article from the Daily Caller:

“Statistics vary regarding how much methane the average dairy cow expels. Some experts say 100 liters to 200 liters a day… while others say it’s up to 500 liters… a day. In any case, that’s a lot of methane, an amount comparable to the pollution produced by a car in a day.”

The article did not go into specific detail about how you would supposedly go about capturing the flatulence of cows and a quick search turned up the image below from Argentina where methane gas emitted from Dairy Cows was being captured.

Image Credit

You gotta be kidding me, right?  So I went and asked Daisy what she thought about me outfitting her with a plastic tank to capture her flatulence.  The look she gave me needed no words for explanation.  As you might imagine, she's not overly enthusiastic about the idea.

"You'll not put a tank on my back to catch gas from when I 'break wind!'"

I honestly don't know what to say about this silliness.  God created cows to have large fermentation vats inside of them in order to aid in digestion, turning that green grass and clover into delicious milk. A process occurs in ruminants called enteric fermentation in which bacteria in the rumen produce methane gas as a by-product. This is nature.  This is what cows do.

When I"m forced to install tubes in uncomfortable places on my cows and burden them with tanks on their backs, it might be time to march somewhere with pitchforks and torches.