Sunday, June 10, 2012

Global Warming "Experts" to Study Kangaroo For Vaccine To Rid Planet of Cow Methane

"HOPE TURNS TOWARDS THE KANGAROO" reads a subhead in bold caps in Catherine Vincent's (quite serious) Le Monde article. With regards to global warming, and to the nefarious impact upon the Earth's atmosphere by the flatulence of cows and other ruminants, "will the kangaroo's stomach microbes one day lead to the cleaning-up of the atmosphere?"

Livestock is the cause of 35% of world emissions of methane, writes Catherine Vincent in the "Planet" section article that apparently she cannot see belongs in Mad Magazine's You Can't Make This Stuff Up department (although the Le Monde cartoonist can, with a cartoon fighting cows' wicked "greenhouse gasses" by adding a "catalytic converter" inside each animal's digestive system).

Among the "main problems" discussed at the 19th World Meat Congress in Paris, we learn, "experts" (the tongue-in-cheek quotation marks are my own) have decided to "act on the ruminants' digestion process."

Indeed, it turns out that the "kangaroo farts and belches like everybody else, but that its gaseous emanations contain no methane." Since "therein likes the difference with the flatulence of ruminant animals", researchers in global warming want to study the marsupial herbivore, specifically things like the bacteria in its stomach.

Thanks to genetic studies, they hope to discover a vaccine, sometime between 2015 and 2020, that would prevent ruminants from generating methane.

That's right, the next step in the distinguished search for new medicines, the next step in the glorious fight against global warming — the noble war of this generation of ours — is to develop an anti-farting vaccine for cows…

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