Johnny Be Good

This morning our cattle came home all in a row from their daily fence inspection. All was good on the perimeters said Bessy, the provider of the cream for our coffee and the dominant matriarch in her stable little hierarchy. They had been chatting with Johnny Be Good's cows out on fringes of the northeast quarter section. Apparently Johnny Be Good had been living up to his moniker, again. Johnny's cows had cornered him in the coral after he lost his temper with them for being a little pushy at his shiny new tractor when he brought them a fresh bale of hay. Seems like they got him stuck in the muck, and he had to make a run for it and jump over the nine foot high coral boards, Johnny being the butt of his cattle's joking around about extremists, and Johnny, not tolerating any of this incitement to joviality, had put them all in the chute and promptly trimmed their horns all off. This had destabilized their dominance hierarchy so much that their glucocorticoid levels were running rampant and this had caused much infighting, all over a bit of horse play. That Johnny Be Good.

Bessy, she's pretty smart, she asked us if we'd check out on the net what the root cause of their friends problems were. So we gathered info from many different sources, some possibly a tad less reliable than others. Applying it all to this situation we found there was a given amount of food and resources available for Johnny's cattle on his homestead. If it was divided evenly among them all, they would all have enough for their needs. It was all in this game of distribution.

Present day conjecture assumes that all cattle have the same opportunity to eat and take care of their needs. Those who are stronger or a bit smarter or have more desire to, can however eat more than others. What arises from this is that once they eat more they may produce more milk or gain more weight and become the favourites of their champions, and this can influence the astuteness involved in allowing them to eat even more and produce even more milk or gain weight even faster. Those with this influence have thus modified their customary feeding habits and their champions are content to enforce this adjustment, in fact, it can become quite an autonomous culture, this enforcement thing, especially with shiny new armaments involved. When other cattle question these conjectures this enforcement culture can get a mite uptight.

So, it would seem here the problem is Johnny's new tractor. Some of his cattle were not too keen on his feeding strategy. Johnny Be Good's dogma which purports to value a shiny new paint job over the needs and desires of his fellow creatures may herald forth a few dissenters. So we were able to give Bessy this information to pass on, that if Johnny Be Good's cattle want to be treated civilly, they must dent and scratch that shiny new tractor till it looks like a a piece of junk. Only then will the dogma evaporate into a sustainable relationship for all parties involved.

As a disclaimer we must add that this solution we passed on to Bessy involves absolutely no conflict of interest. Just because the pile of fence posts we had stored along side our adjoining fence line were slowly disappearing, and Johnny claimed he didn't even know they were there when they were in plain sight, does not mean we have any other interest at heart, other than the well being of his cattle. Now you keep that pot covered, eh.