MAD COWBOY: Plain Truth from the Cattle Rancher Who Won't Eat Meat,   ISBN:9780684854465

Customer Rating: 

This is one of those books that changed the trajectory of my life. I stopped eating meat when, one morning in 1979 I woke up to the aroma of my mother frying bacon. For some reason, still unbeknownst to me, in that moment I realized I couldn't eat meat anymore. It was weird. It still smelled good, I just had no desire to eat it. I still ate fish and foul, although I really wanted to be vegetarian -- I just wanted it to be as "organic" (if that's what it could be called) a change as my sudden relationship shift to meat. In the summer of 2000 I spent a week's vacation with my vegan daughter and decided not to eat fish or fowl while we were together -- just to see if I could do it. After 5 days I had no desire for fish or fowl! I could drive past KFC and my mouth didn't water. My daughter urged me to go all the way to vegan, but I didn't think I could maintain a balanced, nutritious diet. In the Fall of 2000 I went with my daughter to a vegan organization's event during which Howard Lyman spoke. I'd never seen or heard of him before -- had no idea he'd been part of the legal suit brought by some Texas Cattlemen's Association against Oprah, after Lyman's guest appearance on her show. At the event, Mr. Lyman shared the story of his journey from cattle rancher to vegan. I was impressed by him and dumbfounded by his information. Then I read his book. This is the book that catapulted me into being vegan like a freed bird. I still miss the taste of some cheeses and scrambled eggs but I realize what I'm missing is a memory -- like the way I miss my mother -- but nothing more. What's more important to me is what goes into my body and this book made it quite clear that I was unexpectedly ingesting all kinds of drugs I didn't want when I ate any animal products. This book was the beginning of my journey towards better health and I thank my daughter and Howard Lyman!

Customer Rating: 

I actually met Howard Lyman, as he lives in my town and all I can say is that he and his wife, Willow are some of the nicest people who are genuinely concerned about the health and welfare of our nation. I still eat meat, but only organic and I avoid beef and pork at all costs. This book really brings to the light what many fail to recognize.

Customer Rating: 

What an enlightening book! Thank you, Howard Lyman, for telling us your heart-felt story, and the REAL truth. Oh, how truth can be so relative. The general public has been fed "truth" by the meat, poultry & dairy industries, as well as by the medical, pharmaceutical, food & government industries for decades now. And we grow sicker & deader from their "truth" as they continue to profit, immensely.

Thank you, but I think I'll take the truth that is spoken today by Lyman, Dr John McDougall, John Robbins, Dr Neal Barnard, T Colin Campbell, Mike Anderson, Dr Lorraine Day, Paul Stitt, Dr Dan E Chestnut, Rev George Malkmus, and Dr Russell Blaylock, among many, many others.

Customer Rating: 

FCS 417 Life Wellness
Book Review
April 20, 2009
Introduction
The title of the book is "Mad Cowboy - Plain Truth from the Cattle Rancher Who Won't Eat Meat." by Howard Lyman, published in 1998. It is a nonfiction book written by a former cattle rancher and details his experiences and opinions on the meat industry. His intended audience is people that eat meat in American and the method he uses is argument because his primary purpose is to convince people that meat is unsafe to eat. He does this with the technique of persuasion to establish the truths to his statements. He became a vegetarian because he believes it is the best way to avoid a high-fat diet, cancer, and other illnesses. The issue he raises is that people should become vegetarians because eating meat is making people sick. He states it is contaminated and the Food and Drug Administration can not be trusted to provide America the peace of mind that the meat they eat is 100% safe.

Review
In 1996 Howard Lyman, Dr. Gary Weber, and Oprah Winfrey sat on a television stage talking about the beef industry. Dr. Weber is from the National Cattlemen's Beef Association and was defending the cattle industry while Mr. Lyman is a former cattle rancher that was speaking against it. Lyman, Oprah and her production company, Harbo was sued by the Texas Cattlemen because they claimed that Lyman broke the Texas Food Disparagement Act by speaking negatively about the beef America eats. Lyman says he is only telling the truth .Oprah was a party to the lawsuit because after hearing that cattle are fed other cattle she stated, "Cows are herbivores. They shouldn't be eating other cows....It has just stopped me cold from eating another burger" (2 pg.14). The court did not find Lyman and Oprah liable for any damages. But it did launch a beef scare campaign by saying eating beef causes Mad Cow Disease and it would make AIDS, "look like the common cold." Lyman says that the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Food and Drug Administration can not be trusted to correctly regulate the beef industry. He proves this by giving examples of outbreaks in the United States for instance; 1940 Jack in the Box's hamburgers had E-Coli in them, and Sarah Lee- lunch meat and hot dogs killed 21 people.

Lyman who is a forth generation dairy farmer, cattle rancher and ran a feedlot for twenty years says that he knows firsthand how cattle are raised and his conscious got the better of him so he must tell the public. He claims that cattle are fed other diseased cattle because they are fed food that has an added protein to it. This protein is made up of sick and diseased cows, intestines, heads, hooves, blood, 40 billion pounds of euthanized animals from animal shelters, road kill, and even the floor of chicken coops. The mixture is ground up, steam-cooked, dried, pulverized into a brown powder and added to livestock feed. In Arkansas he says an average farm fees over 50 tons of chicken litter mixed with soybean bran to cattle because other feed is too expensive. This increases the risk that humans eating the beef will get E Coli bacteria poisoning from fecal contamination; which 900 Americans die of a year.


Mad Cow disease or BSE causes Creutzfeldt Jakob's Disease in human, which causes the brain to "waste away." In cattle it causes the brain of a cow to resemble a sponge and causes them to fall over and die." This disease had been confirmed in Britain but Lyman says the British government reassured the public it was safe; he does not agree with this. In 1998 there have never been any cases of cattle having this disease in the United States but there are reported cases of "Downer Cow Syndrome." In which every year 100,000 cows mysteriously die; they are fine one day and the next dead. They are sold to rendering plants and ground up for other cattle to eat. If people eat hamburgers, hot dogs, or sausage they might contain central nervous system material which might contain the Mad Cow Disease. The government has banned cattle from other countries thought to have BSE, but Lyman says that is impossible to regulate.

In the book, Mad Cowboy, Lyman states, "Every year thousands of cattle carcasses are left to rot in streams and rivers, polluting them further (Lyman pg. 129.) A way to fix this is to keep farms out of the floodplains, wetland, and monitor the water to make sure it is not being polluted by feces or carcasses (Warren.) He also says that pesticides used on corn, soybeans, and wheat are fed to cattle and they store pesticides in the fat; therefore humans consume high levels of pesticides. He states on page 21, "there are only two things wrong with meat: what we know for sure is in it, and all the other stuff that might be in it."

Lyman is now a vegetarian and President of International Vegetarian Union. In this book he claims that eating meat "is the number one cause of death and disease in America," even above tobacco. His point is that heart attacks are not caused by rice, pears, plums, or broccoli, but by fat and cholesterol. Studies were done that showed people who eat fewer animal products have lower risks of cancer and heart disease. The issue he raises is that a vegetarian diet is the way to "Fight the War on Cancer." He also says that cattle ranching is causing ecological consequences by killing forests, soil erosion, river pollution, overgrazed pastures, dust storms because too much land is converted. He claims that humans are made to be herbivorous because our bodies are designed for a vegetarian diet. Humans have a intestine that is 16-29 feet long and winds round and round which is typical of grass eaters. Carnivores have short and straight intestines which are for passing out meat before it rots. Humans also only have 5 percent the stomach acid strength of a carnivore and do not have powerful claws or jaws but have molars for grinding grain.

Personal Reflections
After I first read the book I was somewhat skeptical of the book "Mad Cowboy" because I believed he is exaggerating many of the things he said. However, there were times I thought that it did made sense to become a vegetarian and Lyman made me want to research the topic further. Once I researched it I am convinced that being a vegetarian is healthier than eating fatty meat. But not for the sole fact of not knowing the safety of eating the meat because vegetables can also be contaminated. There was an outbreak of E Coli in 2006 from spinach and most recently tomatoes. This book has definitely changed my eating habits; the other day before biting into a hamburger this book came to mind and today when at the grocery store I purposely skipped buying the hamburger for my tacos but made a veggie wrap instead. The things he said that come to mind when choosing to skip the meat are thinking of the advantages like losing weight, lowering chances of clogged arteries and tumors. I also do not like the thought that I could be eating euthanized pets, intestines, diseased cattle and especially cattle fed from a mixture containing the dropping from chickens. Lyman states," I believe if the viewing of slaughter was required to eat meat, most folks would become vegetarians." I think this statement is true.

Before reading this book I never thought there were any negative repercussions from eating meat and did not think twice about it, but now I see that their are many disadvantages. I am going to change my eating habits but not because the book; I do not believe all his facts he stated. The book has about fifteen pages of endnotes which tell the reader exactly where he found his information. When reading through the sources I noticed a large amount come from vegetarian biased books and websites. For instance articles titled," The new ethics of eating," Why you don't need meat," "Animal rights resource," Farm Animal Reform Movement," and Vegan Outreach" and even newspaper editorials. I would feel more comfortable believing everything in the book if the information was all from scientific studies, professional journals, or nonbiased resources. But I did come across case-studies, clinical reviews, and medical journals and information from the National Institute of Health, National Cancer Institute and the World Cancer Research group. The website is http://www.vegsource.com/harris/cancer_vegdiet.htm" and it convinced me that not eating meat will decrease your risk of disease. The graphs show the direct correlation between disease and meat, it states "Rates for at least six common types of cancer, country by country, correlate with the consumption of animal source food" (Harris.)


Something else that convinces me is thinking of the food outbreaks in the past I only remember two that the government was able to track the origin of the contamination. The government was never able to identify the slaughter plant or farm the meat originated from that caused the E. coli outbreak in 1993 from fast food hamburgers at Jack in the Box (Marler.) The other one was the recent peanut butter recall that killed 8 which was found to have originated from Peanut Corp. of America because they allegedly falsified documents regarding salmonella testing. Another thing that is being done is President Obama has said he will create a Food Safety Working Group to update food safety laws because they have not been changed since Theodore Roosevelt was president. Thankfully, I learned that now "downer cows," which are animals that cannot stand up have been banned from the food supply because they can swallow manure and pass E.coli into the human food chain. But the down side of this is when undercover animal rights groups went undercover they videotaped many instances of this law being abused. Lyman wrote this book in 1998 and said there were no cases of Mad Cow Disease in the U.S. Now there are, since 2004 the USDA has tested 759,000 animals for mad cow disease and two have tested positive (Luna.)


Conclusion
I choose this book because my husband is a pharmaceutical sales representative and sales vaccines and antibiotics to cattle farmers. He has always been very against Oprah because he said she started the whole "it's not safe to eat beef and Mad Cow Disease fear." It seemed odd to me why Oprah who does shows on fashion, beauty, and relationships would suddenly decide to protest against the beef industry; I wanted to educate myself so I could hear the whole story. Now I think Oprah got caught in the middle and no one should have been sued. Lyman had the right to freedom of speech to talk about what he saw. Lyman states, "I would love to see the meat industry and the pesticide industry shaken up, too. I would love to see feedlots close and factory farming end." (Lyman pg. 189.) I do not agree with this statement because that would be taking away people's livelihood. I do believe that the United States does need more government regulation in the beef industry because it is a problem.

I would recommend this book to others because it opens the door to making someone think more about what they buy at the grocery store and where it came from. People should care about their health and look into ways to maintain physical wellness. In conclusion I believe this book has achieved its goal because it changed my thoughts on eating beef and perhaps this paper will make others think twice about what they eat too.


Works Cited

Dr Vernon Colemanhttp. "21 Reasons for Being Vegetarian." Giveusahome.com www.giveusahome.co.uk/articles/vegetarianism.htm. 21 March 2009.

Lyman, Howard. Mad Cowboy. Scribner, NY. Copyright 1998. March 20, 2009. 1-189.
ISBN number 0-684-84516-4.

Luna, Nancy." Is Eating Beef Safe?" Orange County News Source. April 8, 2008. http://www.ocregister.com/articles/food-safety-usda-2014112-recall-meat. 23 March 2009.

Marler, Bill. Bill Marler.com.Jack in the Box E-coli outbreak. http://www.billmarler.com/key_case/jack-in-the-box-e-coli-outbreak/. 24 March 2009.

Shantz, Gwen. "Why what's for Dinner May be About to Change." Alternet.org. 20 March 2009.

University of Vermont Extension. "What is BME, or Mad Cow Disease?" http://www.uvm.edu/livestock/bse/whatisbse.html. 24 March 2009.

Vance Publishing. "EPA Proposed Cow Tax." CattleNetwork.com.http://www.cattlenetwork.com/Content.asp?ContentID=269579. 19 March 2009.

Warren, Leon and Caroline Denaul. A Guide to Protecting Your Health and the Environment. Is Your Food Safe? Three Rivers Press. Copyright 2002. 22, March 2009.

Winfrey, Oprah. Infoplease.com. 2006. http://www.infoplease.com/ipea/A0154983.html. 29 October 2006.

University of Vermont Extension. "What is BME, or Mad Cow Disease?" http://www.uvm.edu/livestock/bse/whatisbse.html. 24 March 2009.

Harris, Dr. William. Cancer and the Vegetarian Diet. The Scientific Basis of Vegetarianism. 21 December 1999..http://www.vegsource.com/harris/cancer_vegdiet.htm. 21 March 2009.

Customer Rating: 

This is an excellent book by a fourth-generation Montana cattle rancher turned vegetarian. Lyman writes about how he inherited his father's farm and destroyed it through chemical agricultural practices he learned in college.

Right before undergoing surgery for a spinal tumor he remembered how fertile his soil used to be and how dead it now was. He determined then that he would restore the farm his father had given him. During recuperation he took a personal inventory and saw a selfish and callous man. And that inventory began his change toward compassion, vegetarianism and political activism.

The majority of the book covers the detrimental effects to the environment and our health in choosing a meat-based diet to include chemical farm management, antibiotics, bovine growth hormone, mad cow disease and related human diseases, loss of forest, top soil, desertification, global warming, loss of wildlife, water pollution, etc. You'll get a nice education of the kind of foods they feed cattle that we in turn ingest. The last chapter includes some sound dietary recommendations.

He writes: "It's humbling to think that, even after turning over the greater share of our public land to cattle ranchers, and in spite of the massive feedlot operations fouling our country, we Americans still need to import beef to satisfy our collective demand for heart attacks. In the process, we facilitate the chopping down of Central and South American rain forest, while leaving the populations of those countries impoverished."

This book is an excellent introduction to the horrendous negative impact beef production and consumption is having to our health and the health of our planet. It holds a permanent place in my library.

To learn more about the history of cattle, check out Jeremy Rifkin's Beyond Beef: The Rise and Fall of the Cattle Culture (Plume). If you'd like to learn about how the meat you eat is produced and how it gets to the grocery store shelf, try Fast Food Nation or The Meat You Eat: How Corporate Farming Has Endangered America's Food Supply.