On one of our deer-hunting expeditions, I was sitting on a log in a big clearing in the woods, thinking about Plato and Aristotle and the Kappa Kappa Gamma girls. I didn’t really care whether we got a deer that day or not. It was a couple of days before opening, anyway. The whole procedure was probably illegal as hell. Mac was out in the woods somewhere looking for deer around the clearing. I was sitting on the log, thinking, when I saw a chip of bark fly away from the log all by itself, about a foot from my left hand. Then I heard the blast of Mac’s revolver—that big old .44 he’d probably liberated from his father. Then I heard him laugh.

“That’s not very funny, Mackie,” I said.

“Now don’t whine and complain, Ed,” he said. “You want to be a real hunter like me, you gotta learn to stay awake.”

We never did get a deer with handguns. But that’s when I had my first little doubts about Mackie, and about the cowboy type in general. But I still loved him. Worshipped him, in fact. I was caught in the grip of the Western myth. Anybody said a word to me against cowboys, I’d jump down his throat with my spurs on. Especially if Mac was standing nearby.

Sometimes I’d try to ride those broncs that he brought in, trying to prove that I could be a cowboy too. Trying to prove it more to myself than to him. I’d be on this crazy, crackpot horse going up, down, left, right and inside out. Hanging on to the saddle horn with both hands. While Mac sat on the corral fence, throwing beer bottles at us and laughing. Every time I got thrown off, Mac would say, “Now get right back on there, Ed. Quick, quick. Don’t spoil ’im.”

It took me a long time to realize I didn’t have to do that kind of work. And it took me another thirty years to realize that there’s something wrong at the heart of our most popular American myth—the cowboy and his cow.

[Jeers.]

You may have guessed by now that I’m thinking of criticizing the livestock industry. And you are correct. I’ve been thinking about cows and sheep for many years. Getting more and more disgusted with the whole business. Western cattlemen are nothing more than welfare parasites. They’ve been getting a free ride on the public lands for over a century, and I think it’s time we phased it out. I’m in favor of putting the public-lands livestock grazers out of business.

First of all, we don’t need the public-lands beef industry. Even beef lovers don’t need it. According to most government reports (Bureau of Land Management, Forest Service), only about 2 percent of our beef, our red meat, comes from the public lands of the eleven Western states. By those eleven I mean Montana, Nevada, Utah, Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, Idaho, Wyoming, Oregon, Washington and California. Most of our beef, aside from imports, comes from the Midwest and the East, especially the Southeast—Georgia, Alabama, Florida—and from other private lands across the nation. More beef cattle are raised in the state of Georgia than in the sagebrush empire of Nevada. And for a very good reason: back East, you can support a cow on maybe half an acre. Out here, it takes anywhere from twenty-five to fifty acres. In the red-rock country of Utah, the rule of thumb is one section—a square mile—per cow.