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TIME Europe, February 28, 2000
Don't Have a Cow, Man!
A meat lover's rebellion the net starts a grass-roots campaign to save British bovines
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What? an online campaign to liberate bovines infected with "mad cow disease"? Even as the furor over bovine spongiform encephalopathy dies down, passionate concern about the possible solution is growing online. The Cow Liberation Front Website is run by a pseudo-revolutionary group urging people to protest the proposed slaughter by combustion of 1 million British cows.
"I just felt sorry for them," said Robert Manuel, the 22-year-old leader of the CLF, from his headquarters at Wolverhampton University in Britain. "There seemed to be no one saying, 'What about the cows?'" Manuel has created mad-cow computer wallpaper and a series of ribbons emblazoned with slogans like ME? I'M WITH THE COWS.
There are a variety of serious Websites dedicated to the disease, including scientific analyses from the British government and news archives from CNN. At the mad-cow.com site, sympathizers are asked to boycott British Airways and write letters to the government in protest. "I wanted to alert people to the needless slaughter," said Dilip Shah, a retail store owner in Philadelphia. Shah doesn't have the resources to print flyers, so he put his flyer on the Web, and it has attracted 60,000 visitors from around the world since April.
On the other hand, there are a number of humorous sites on the subject. And like that of the Cow Liberation Front, these pages often use humor as sugar coating to get their real message across: these cows haven't hurt anyone. The Unofficial Mad Cow Revenge News home page tracks the progress of a worldwide cow uprising, while the Cow Liberation Army Fraction (sic), based in Sweden, opposes all forms of bovine oppression, including "cow tipping." You can copy a special cowhide-patterned ribbon for your own home page from a German site to show your support for the mooing cause.
There is a Mad Cow Award given to the "most udderly useless" Websites. And even if no technological solution has been found for the disease, the Web at least offers an opportunity for breakthroughs of another kind: the Amazing CowCam, a live picture of a cow field updated every five minutes, is surely the first of its kind online.
But though the animal in the picture seems perfectly sane now, the pressure of sitting for a round-the-clock, round-the-world audience may be enough to trigger madness of another kind.
With reporting by Tony Glover/London
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