Bovaer is Bullshit

Perhaps the best thing to come out of the Bovaer/burping cows scandal was this Tweet by me.

The point about Bovaer is not that it may or may not be harmless and that it may or may not have a significant impact on cow methane. The point is that it is entirely unnecessary because man-made climate change is TOTALLY made up bollocks.

I like the Tweet because it’s true and succinct. But I like it even more for the reaction it got: almost everyone out of 215,000 people who saw it agreed strongly with the sentiment.

Here are some sample reactions:

Said it all in one short paragraph

Bingo! (Get this man a pint, please)

Glad someone said that

Totally unnecessary!!! Let the cows fart!

I could go on. 629 people commented, most of them positive. 4.6K were sufficiently inspired to share it. And 19K people liked it.

OK, so these aren’t Elon-Musk-level or Russell-Brand-level numbers. But unlike Musk, I do not own Twitter, and unlike Brand I’m not a closet Satanist with an eerie, Svengali-like hold over my audience. Also, unlike both of them, my reach is heavily suppressed via the algorithms. So I think, all in all, the fact that well over 200,000 people got to see my message and approve of it is jolly good going.

What this tells me is something that I’ve long hoped for but which I’ve never quite dared believe could be true. It appears we have reached the stage where no one - or at least no one with half a brain - buys into the ‘global warming’ narrative any more.

When they read a phrase as baldly unequivocal as ‘man-made climate change is TOTALLY made up bollocks’, they no longer sigh uncomfortably and murmur something rueful about ‘the polar bears’ or ‘Greenland ice sheets’ or about how they ‘can’t believe we can be pumping all that carbon into the atmosphere without making some sort of difference to climate.’

Instead, most sensible people now just nod furiously in agreement.

But obviously you’re never going to get this from the mainstream media which continues, relentlessly, to gaslight us with the message that climate scepticism is a minority activity and that people who don’t want carcinogenic, testicle-shrinking poison fed to dairy cattle in order to save the planet are just bonkers conspiracy theorists.

For example, the Daily Telegraph, formerly a newspaper, got its house, posh-named eco warrior Boudicca Fox-Leonard to pen an article explaining why the Bovaer scandal was just a storm in a teacup. It was headlined “Why British milk is churning up scary online conspiracies.”

It quoted one ‘expert’ as saying: “You can’t just add anything to the food chain without safety testing, although it appears you can claim what you like on social media.”

But the bulk of the ‘expert’ opinionating was given over to one Karen Douglas, apparently ‘a professor of social psychology at the University of Kent.’ Professor Douglas was used by Ms Fox-Leonard to help explain away all the criticisms of Bovaer and feeding additives generally as a form of mental illness.

“Psychological research suggests that people are attracted to conspiracy theories when one or more fundamental psychological needs are frustrated”, says Douglas.

What idiots we are! There were most of us foolishly imagining that the reason we’re worried about carcinogenic, testicle-shrinking poison put in cow food is that it’s a bad idea and entirely unnecessary. Whereas, it turns out, the real reason we’re worried about it is that - according to Douglas, anyway - we ‘need to feel safe and have control over things that are happening around us’ and we ‘need to maintain our self-esteem and feel positive about the groups that we belong to.’ In other words, the main reason we’re against Bovaer is that we’re just funny in the head.

But the most disappointing article I read about Bovaer, also run in the Telegraph, was by Jamie Blackett and headlined ‘Let’s not get into hysterics about climate friendly milk.’

I like Blackett very much, both as a friend and as a very talented and entertaining writer on rural affairs. As a farmer, he usually knows whereof he speaks. But in this particular article, he surrenders to the enemy without a shot fired.

The subs, I’m sure, will have written that nauseatingly propagandising headline (“Climate friendly milk”. Ugh!), and the similarly grisly standfirst (“This is an honest attempt to do what everyone wants us to do - reduce cow flatulence”). But Blackett cannot escape culpability for paragraphs like the one below.

The dairy industry has been blamed for climate change for two decades by everyone from governments to schoolchildren via Extinction Rebellion. Rightly or wrongly Britain has pledged to reduce methane by 30 per cent by 2030. This is an honest attempt to do what everyone wants us to do – reduce cow flatulence.

I think it’s the word ‘honest’ I most take issue with here. There is nothing honest about farmers feeding their livestock carcinogenic, testicle shrinking poison in order to appease bureaucrats. If he were looking for a more ‘honest’ adjective, surely a more apt one might have been ‘cowardly’, ‘craven’, ‘pusillanimous’, ‘cynical’ or ‘self-defeating’?

What I also thoroughly dispute in that paragraph is Blackett’s statement that ‘everyone’ wants farmers to ‘reduce cow flatulence.’ I find this excuse about as plausible as if he’d said ‘Big boys made us do it and then ran away.’ Not for a moment am I suggesting that there is not huge pressure from certain quarters on the farming industry to do all manner of farming-unfriendly things: put up wind-turbines; ruin the landscape with solar panels; rewilding; feed your dairy herd carcinogenic, testicle shrinking poison; etc. I just think it’s a bit of a stretch to suggest that those certain quarters represent ‘everyone.’

It’s a bit like saying ‘Everyone wants more Storm Shadow missiles shipped to Kyiv so that Zelensky can defend Ukraine’s sovereignty against Putin.’ Or ‘Everyone wants digital ID to prevent voting fraud and social injustice’. Or ‘Everyone believes more vaccines should be ready for the next pandemic.’

Sure, in each case, it’s what the mainstream media narrative might wish you to think that ‘everyone’ believes. But that’s just the mainstream media gas-lighting you again.

It goes almost without saying, by the way, that all the ‘science’ behind cow burping and methane and global warming is spurious and fabricated to suit the needs of the various vested interests pushing the climate change scam. I know this because in the several years I spent researching my book Watermelons - How Environmentalists Are Killing The Planet, Destroying The Economy, And Stealing Your Children’s Future - never once (and I do mean never once) did I encounter a single piece of hard scientific evidence supporting Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming theory. It’s junk. All of it.

And now everyone knows it’s junk. That’s why I was so delighted by the response to that Tweet of mine I cited at the beginning. Nobody (well almost nobody) is buying this nonsense any more. They’ve had it up to the teeth.

No one, apart from a tiny minority of brainwashed activists, is following the Bovaer story and going: “Well on the one hand, I can see the dangers of contaminating the food supply with experimental additives but on the other we really have to try what ever new measures we can to help save the planet from global warming.”

No. What people are saying is: “I don’t care whether or not this stuff reduces methane by however many percent. And I don’t care how many times more powerful a greenhouse gas methane is than CO2. And I don’t care that it’s only an experiment. And I don’t care if the cows are otherwise well-cared for. And I don’t care whether or not farmers are being bullied into doing this by official methane-reduction directives.

All I care about is that this whole thing is ENTIRELY unnecessary, so I don’t want even a tiny bit of this noxious crap in my milk. Got that?”