Free Blame It on the Dog by Jim Dawson Page A

hundred years, and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) estimates that all livestock are responsible for 25 percent of America’s methane emissions.
    True, the average cow is responsible for producing about 634 quarts of methane a day.
    True, there are about 1.3 billion cows munching vegetation all over the world—more than double the 1970 population—and collectively putting nearly 100 million tons of methane into the atmosphere each year.
    But now scientists are claiming that despite a lot of lampoon-tinged news items and cow flatulence jokes over the past decade, the main culprit is burping, not farting. I may have even overstated the problem myself in my mini-chapter “Farts May Be the Death of Mankind” in
Who Cut the Cheese?
    According to a June 2003 article in the
Los Angeles Times
, scientists now estimate that 96 percent of cow-generated methane comes from the front end, not the back. Good old Elsie has four stomachs (including a big one that holds forty-two gallons of material) anda chronic case of indigestion. She’s constantly chewing, digesting, and regurgitating each meal over and over again—and every time she belches, she expels methane, thanks to an intestinal bacterium that converts hydrogen into the heavier gas. Overall, front and back, about 6 percent of a cow’s diet is lost as methane into the air.
    Iowa Senator Charles E. Grassley suggested a dozen years ago that all cows should be fitted with anal airbags, complete with catalytic (or cattle-itic) converters, to harness this source of energy. But like everyone else, he was looking at the wrong end. Grassley also suggested that “if that does not work in reducing cow methane gas emissions, we can tax them. Call it another gas tax.”
    Well, that’s exactly what politicians tried to do in New Zealand. According to a 2003 BBC report, New Zealand farmers were outraged by a proposed tax on the flatulence and belches coming from their sheep and cattle. This all came about when local scientists estimated that barnyard methane was responsible for more than half of the island country’s greenhouse gases, prompting Prime Minister Helen Clark’s government in Wellington to declare that a tax on ruminant farm animals would help the country meet its gas reduction quotas under the Kyoto Protocol on global warming.
    Farts and belches from cows, sheep, goats, and deer, whose multiple stomachs are constantly digesting grasses, may account for only 15 percent of worldwide emissions of methane, but in countries with a large agricultural sector, the proportion is much higher. There are only about four million bipedal, single-stomach New Zealanders, but they own forty-five million sheep, ten million head of cattle, and many other animals, which produce 90 percent of their country’s methane and 40 percent of their total greenhouse emissions. In June 2003, Patrick Goodenough, Pacific Rim Bureau Chief for CNSNews. com, reported that a herd of two hundred head of New Zealand dairy cattle produces enough annual methane gas to drive an average vehicle more than 120,000 miles.
    The proposed “fart and belch” tax was expected to raise almost $5 million a year that could be used to fund research into ways of minimizing the effects of agricultural exhalations. However, members of a group called Federated Farmers of New Zealand nearly had a cow when they heard the news. They argued that since the governmenthad signed the Kyoto agreement on behalf of every citizen, any taxes for research should be borne equally by all. The farmers were also baleful because the proposed levy would make it harder for them to compete against agricultural interests in countries that hadn’t ratified Kyoto, including the United States and Australia.
    Buoyed by a September 2003 opinion poll that said 80 percent of their fellow citizens opposed the tax, the Federated Farmers launched a campaign called Fight Against Ridiculous Taxes (FART). A thousand farmers descended on Wellington