Cows are terribly destructive creatures, especially in arid climates. Livestock are considered by a quorum of scientists as the No. 1 cause of species extinction, topsoil loss, deforestation and desertification in the American West. They muck or stomp or gorge out of existence streams, whole watersheds, rare grasses and shrubs, entire ecosystems in micro. Their big heavy hooves trample the soil, eroding it often beyond repair. Just as the cow is an invasive species, an exotic in the West—an import of Spanish missionaries in the 16th century—it brings invasive weeds that triumph in its midst: the water-greedy tamarisk, for example, along with the greedier Russian olive and the useless Russian thistle, better known as tumbleweed. A 1998 study from the Journal of Arid Environments found that a hundred years of livestock grazing on public lands near the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico was more damaging in terms of long-term development and recovery of flora than multiple nuclear bomb blasts.
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I suggest yak as our new dinner flesh. My friend Rob Williams, a newspaper publisher and professor of journalism in Vermont, helps runs a yak ranch outside the Vermont village of Waitsfield, in the Green Mountains. I went to visit him not long ago, to walk the pastures where he keeps the 45 yaks that he and his two business partners tend for the production of yak ribs, sirloin, rounds, flank, ground and sausage. “I like to think that yaks are the greenest red meat on the planet,” Rob tells me.