The United Kingdom

"Oh, you're going to England?! Well that's just great! Your cousin Mae was there last spring, and you just have to talk to her before you go! She had such a wonderful time. She went to Stratford-upon-Avon and Bath and Stonehenge and Brighton, and she met this wonderful guy in Ireland. You've gotta make sure you get to Ireland and Scotland..."

Forget what they say about England's charming vistas, green rolling hills, beautiful people and ancient ruins; the entire U.K. is a deathtrap.

Read the news. Everywhere you look, brothers are dying. 95 confirmed cases in Great Britain. One in Northern Ireland. Yet those numbers don't tell how many of my people have been ruthlessly led to the slaughter, mown down and thrown on the fire in the name of cutting losses.

I'm talking about foot-and-mouth, the bovine plague, which has virtually every hoofed mammal in the U.K. sweating bullets, wondering if the next careless human to wander in without washing his feet is going to spell the end for us.

Dolly has been quarantined. The horse-racing industry has come under scrutiny. And the European Union has banned livestock markets. Despite all this, British farmers want restrictions loosened.

In possible good news, nobody wants to buy beef anymore, and the industry is slow to get our carcasses to market. But really, what's better? Knowing that once you hit a certain weight you're going to be slaughtered and sent to market? Or the silent dread of purposeless death and being thrown onto the fire that comes along with foot and mouth?

They don't have this stuff in the United States, which is part of what leads me to believe that the U.K. is a lousy place to be a cow.

Sure, the American meat industry was once the subject of a book called "The Jungle," but despite their hormone-fed super-turkeys and shitting-all-over-themselves chickens, the Americans treat their meat proper. They even have a Cow Palace.

The English will tout their superiority for having kept out mega-conglomerate Monsanto and having better support for whole foods in general, but this is a country that feeds its cattle their own brains.

Speaking of that, what's with Mad Cow disease anyway? Mad cow? Oh yeah, blame the victim. Stupid rancher disease is more like it. They kill us, chop us up, and feed our own brains back to us? And we're the mad ones!

Now you've really got me going. Excuse me, I'm off to go lick some salt.

— Buster the Cow, by way of Eric Wittmershaus (eric@flakmag.com)