A Bull**** Article About Bull****

The story is, quite literally, about what comes out the back end of bulls. And it's full of the same.

Reporting in the San Jose MercNews, journo-greenie Paul Rodgers hyperventilates:

Bay Area hikers heading to the Sierra Nevada this summer should be extra careful about where they find their drinking water, particularly if cows are nearby.

That's the upshot of a new study that found cattle-grazing in national forests between Lake Tahoe and Mount Whitney is the leading source of E. coli contamination in Sierra streams and lakes.

In fact, nearly every stream and lake frequented by cattle or pack animals contained unsafe levels of E. coli -- a bacterium found in livestock waste that can produce severe stomach illness and even kidney failure in humans.

The study reportedly found no such incidence of E. coli when cattle weren't around. I don't believe it, and I don't believe that Rogers didn't bother to ask ... or bother to report the answer to, in any case ... the obvious question: Does a bear poop in the woods?

I saw a study of E. coli in ocean water in which DNA analysis was used to determine the source of the E. coli. While enviros would like us to think it all came from urban runoff (i.e., human, dogs, etc.), in fact it came primarily from sea mammals, followed by sea birds.

So I'd like to ask this study's author, Robert Derlet of UC Davis, why just cattle? Why not E. coli from squirrels, elk, bears, deer, rabbits, coyotes, pumas, skunks, birds, snakes and all the other wild critters for whom we are protecting these wilderness areas? Are they carefully burying their waste? Using outhouses? Just holding it in?

The enviro agenda calls for moving cattle out of national forests because it's supposedly so destructive of Earth Goddesses. (Greenies also call land that's been grazed for decades "pristine wilderness" if it's slated for development -- go figger.)

Derlet's study, published in Wilderness and Environmental Medicine, for cryin' out loud, seems to be agenda-fodder, not real science.

Tags: Greenies, E. coli, Sierras