How Now Cow Magnet?

You´d think someone who grew up in Texas would know about such things. It´s almost like discovering some secret of the domestic animal kingdom. Until I saw an installment of a PBS educational television show called Under the Microscope, I thought I knew what a cow magnet was. Before I got educated via broadcast, I thought a cow magnet was something that stuck to the refrigerator and held expired coupons and yellowing school papers in place. That decorative item is but one kind of cow magnet. And the other kind has nothing to do with attracting cows. The other cow magnet is a palm-size bullet- or capsule-shaped object designed to be swallowed by a cow and reside in the bovine´s first stomach to attract metallic objects which may be ingested by the grazing animal. The metal objects, byproducts of man´s industrious efforts to contain consumable goods (like cows in fields or beans in cans), are attracted by the magnet and prevent further injury by keeping barbed wire bits and tin can shards in the first stomach so that they do not enter the other stomachs of the cow. I located cow magnets for sale in a local livestock supply store.

Having read all of James Herriot´s books and seen, on the same station where I saw Under the Microscope, many episodes of the British television series All Creatures Great and Small which is based on the books, I was not surprised that cows eat metal. But the cow magnet was used on Under the Microscope to demonstrate how people eat metal. Without swallowing the magnet, the narrator of the program demonstrated how a cow magnet could be used to extract metal shavings which are added to breakfast cereals. Iron shavings are added to breakfast cereals like Total so that, per serving, they contain a high percentage of the recommended Daily Value of iron.

Now bovines have often been accused of being stupid animals. But from the objective viewpoint of, say, an alien being, which organism is stupider, the one which accidentally ingests metal particles put there by another animal or the one which intentionally ingests metal shavings which it itself put there?



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