Re: POTM: Evolution week here at the ranch


Martin Hutton wrote:
Nominated...nice example of selection at work!
(and a vicarious experience for us armchair cowboy wannabes -
with the added fillip of reinvoked memories of sheep, rubber bands,
and Hellermans)

Seconded.

--
Martin Hutton

Desertphile wrote:
First off I must thank all of you flesh eaters for buying bovine flesh
to eat. It does not bring in much money here at the ranch, but it pays
for my satellite internet access. (I'm a vegetarian for reasons of
compassion: I like animals, including some humans. Tom Cruise, of
course, still sucks.)

It was spring round-up, and all the little doggies and their mommies
were bunched up down by the river (three miles east of here) and driven
into the canyon. This is done every spring, moving the herd from their
winter grazing (where they are fed a dozen bales of hay every two
days), and onto their summer grazing area 1,700 feet higher (a lofty
8,180 feet above mean sea level). In between, the poor bastards are
"processed" by us unfeeling, cold, implacable human monsters.

The older cows (four to five years old) are used to the man-handling
and they more or less accept the abuse. Of course they do not actually
enjoy watching their children roughed up, but they pretty much appear
to know we will not harm their wee tots too badly.

The younger cows, however, generally go berserk with rage at having
their precious bundles of joy dragged away from their sides.

The herd gets separated into cows, calves, and the two bulls. The cows
are run through a chute into a head gate, then a cowboy grabs the cows
lips and pulls them apart to examine the cow's teeth. If the teeth are
worn down so much that she will have trouble chewing grass, she is told
"No more evolution for you, lass!" and her name (ear tag number) is
written down; come fall she will be separated from the herd and sold as
dog food. (Shudder!)

Then the calves, who bunch up in a quivering terrorized crowd while
wailing and screaming for their mothers, get ganged up on. The cedar
fire is started and the two branding irons are set into the pit to heat
up nice and hot. The Gerber knife gets a fresh hone on it, and the
scrotum hand crimper is placed in a bucket of water.

Once the branding irons are hot, we go looking for volunteers among the
calves to see who wants to be first. Ain't never one that does, so out
comes the loop of rope. We grab a calf and the calf gets roped,
"throwed," knelt on the head, and branded--- like we wuz
sure-enough-god-damned-real cowboys (FINALLY! A REAL MAN AT LAST!).

"Now this ain't gonna hurt a bit," I usually tell the calf while I
shove on its neck with one knee and lock its hind legs under my left
armpit. Of course when another cowboy (Andrew or Larry of Garrick)
walks up with the branding iron, I have to look away and brace myself:
the brand comes down, the hair and hide burst into thick white smoke
(and now and then flame jets up), and the calf goes
"Bewuuuuuuuuuughhhh!" as loudly as it can, usually with a hoarse
gasping hiss at the end.

(The owner of the ranch, and the rest of us, hate doing this but it is
a legal requirement in New Mexico. One year we tried *PAINTING* the
calves instead of branding them, but the paint washed off and there
were complaints by the branding authority: every beastie is required by
law to have a brand.)

If the calf is a boy, the horror for him has just started--- he is
ejected from the evolutionary time stream, and it ain't pretty. The
Gerber knife is produced, the calf's balls are grabbed, and the calf's
scrotum is (are?) slit open. Out come the testicles, which get thrown
to the ranch dogs to fight over; the scrotum is then crimped closed. I
almost always flinch when this happens, and my balls feel a sympathetic
twitch and tingle.

If the calf is a girl and there have been any cows found with poor
teeth, the heifer's hips and looked at to see if she will make a good
mother. If her hips are too narrow she will be sold with the steers in
the fall; if she looks like a likely, comely, pretty lass with wide
hips, she will join the evolutionary march into the future and have a
fairly happy and free five or six years.

This process, as ugly as it is, seems to me to be a good (if one can
call such a barbaric process "good") example of evolution. No one can
watch or participate and claim evolution does not happen: it is an
observed fact here at the ranch every spring. Evolution may be defined
as "Differential reproductive success," and/or "A change in a
population's gene pool over time:" both of which happens to the herd
(and every bovine herd on every working cattle ranch) here in the
spring.

The fact that humans do the selecting does not change the fact that it
is evolution in action: "natural selection" includes humans performing
the selection because humans are part of the natural world. Speaking
evolutionary, it does not matter if a bear or a pack of coyotes does
the selection (and we got plenty of such selectors running around here
in the canyon--- I saw a bear bare foot by the river this morning) or
if a human does the selecting.

Is there such a thing as non-natural selection in evolution? Well,
sure, but only in mythology: it's called "Creationism." One example is
the Great Flood and Ut-napishtim's Ark (1,800 years later called
"Noah's" Ark)--- the god Enlil got pissed off and decided to end
humanity forever but the god Ea selected a few humans to live.

When a god does the selecting it is not natural selection; when
anything else does the selecting (be it predators, climate changes,
geological changes, a new and protective symbiosis (such as humans
selecting various strains of wine yeast), or comet impact--- it's all
natural selection.

I should also point out for the benefit of Creationists here that if
the believe their favorite god(s) flooded Earth and wiped out almost
all of humanity, that is also a fine example of evolution occurring.
"Flood geology" could be, and would be, part of evolutionary theory if
"The Flood" had actually happened: in the face of such drastic changes
to the human genome (i.e., evolution), it does not matter in the end if
a non-natural force (your god(s)) had set that monstrous demonic crime
in motion or if a comet strike had done it.

.