"Only the Ones Who Had a Cow Survived"

The Holodomor showed that cattle are independence. They have to go.

Given the weak and simplistic climate case against cattle, why is banning them even a thing? 

There’s the visceral dislike of farmers and ranchers widespread among the urban elite, of course. They are hicks and rednecks, backward and regressive in every way. What’s not to hate if you’re a liberal elite? But I think that’s more the reason for why they don’t care, rather than why they actively want to get rid of them. This attitude has been with us for centuries, and definitely not anything new. City people disdain hayseeds. Reasonable people know they have to put up with farmers if they want to eat. 

The Left’s feelings about farmers are multi-layered, ultra-inconsistent, and require some sorting out, so let’s just focus on their feelings about cattle culture here.  And, as in all things, we have to distinguish between the liberal and the Leftist, Marxist, or socialist. Since most liberals don’t realize the degree to which they’ve been coopted and manipulated by the Left and thus have internalized Marxist beliefs, let’s talk primarily about those beliefs. 

From the point of view of the agrarian or of the communist, cattle are independence. You can grow them on nothing but grass. They need minimal shelter and minimal care. You just need a couple of acres or so per cow, depending on where you live. Cattle can eat about anything. The poorest peasants worldwide routinely raise cattle. Farmers grow them on spent brewery grains, orange peels, all kinds of stuff, but their favorite is grass. And grass is about everywhere. If you have a cow, and you have grass, you can have meat and milk. 

That couple of acres and one cow will produce enough milk for a family. Add some more land and another cow and they’ll keep you in meat. It doesn’t have to be good land, either. It can be pretty rough, dry, and infertile, though, if that’s the case, you might require a little more of it. 

During the Holodomor, the famine that Soviet Communists imposed on the Ukrainian kulaks who resisted collectivization, somewhere between three and ten million peasants starved to death. The government searched for and seized all the food they could find from the peasants. They left them with nothing. Accounts frequently say that only those who had a cow survived. The Communists seized private livestock for the collectives, but thousands of kulaks killed their cattle and horses rather than let the state take them. A few stayed in private hands, because of lenient, inefficient, or corrupt bureaucrats, and those families lived. They guarded their livestock day and night. As conditions grew more desperate, some kept their cattle alive by feeding them on the thatch from their roofs. Those without a cow ate tree bark and sometimes practiced cannibalism. Having a cow made a life or death difference.