An Honest Plague

RM WEEKLY · ISSUE NO. 5

Four issues behind us. I've been putting this topic off. I waited because I wanted everyone sitting down and serious before we opened this particular door. We've done the math. We've done the craft. We've done the cheese and wine, and the good man in India. Now let's talk about something nobody in the dairy industry is comfortable discussing.

Every animal worth farming carries something that can hurt you. The rat included. There. It's on the table.

For the rat, it's called the hantavirus. The hantavirus can live in the animal this entire enterprise stands upon, and it doesn’t care about your business plan.

Hantavirus rides in the saliva. It rides in the waste, the urine and the droppings, the daily maintenance in any dairy. For hantavirus, the part we all need to respect is that it doesn't need the animal at all to spread. It dries into the dust. You sweep a shed that's gone too long unswept, you kick up a year of it, breathe it in, and the thing is in your lungs before you've finished the thought. No bite. No scratch. Just dust, bad luck, and a set of lungs that are suddenly not yours anymore.

I grew up in the back of a van in the dry country, the Four Corners country, the exact ground where this thing first stood up and announced itself to people who looked a great deal like us. Poor. Dusty. Sleeping where they could.

I know that silence. There is a particular kind of quiet that drops over a hot afternoon when everyone has just remembered, all at once, what the dust can do. I have stood in it. I am not afraid of it, but I respect the hell out of it. The same way you’d respect a sinkhole you can't see the bottom of.

So here’s what I’m proposing to this industry, I want it written down while we are still small enough to write things down and have them hold.

We treat the hantavirus exactly the treat mad cow disease.

Think about what that means. The cow people didn't faint. They didn't shutter the parlor and weep. They built a wall of procedure around their plague. Testing, tracing, rules about what touches what, gloves and ventilation and a hundred boring protocols nobody ever thanks them for. They turned terror into paperwork. That is the single most adult thing that industry has ever done, and I will hand it to them freely.

That is the table I want us sitting at. Not the children's table, where you giggle at the word mischief and run screaming from a little dust. The adults' table, where a serious person looks a fatal thing dead in the eye and says: fine. Gloves. Airflow. Wet the surface before you sweep, so it can't fly. Respect the animal, respect the dust, build the rules, keep the rules. You want to be in real dairy? Real dairy has a plague, and a binder full of rules about it. Welcome. Put on the gloves.

But I'll tell you where the comparison cracks. Mad cow was a sin. We don't say that part enough. That plague did not come down from heaven; they made it. They took a cow, an animal that eats grass and only grass, and to save a nickel they ground up the dead and fed them back to the living. They turned a peaceful grazer into a cannibal for the spreadsheet, and the spreadsheet sent them a bill written in something nobody can cure. That's hubris. That's a man trying to be clever and the universe getting even.

The hantavirus is nothing like that. Nobody made it. Nobody fed anything to anyone. It is the wild being the wild, the way it was long before us and the way it will be long after. The rat didn't betray its own design to carry it. The rat is exactly what it has always been. The danger is honest. It’s clean in the terrible way that only the truth can be. And I’ll take an honest danger over a manufactured one every day of the week. I respect its honesty.

The rat does not lie to you about what it is. That is the whole reason I trust it more than the animal they had to turn into a cannibal to get rich.

So learn the rules. Wet the floor. Wear the gloves. Ventilate the shed. Don't get cute, don't get casual, don't be the cowboy who skips the steps to look brave in front of the new people. That man is not brave, he’s a statistic. Follow the procedure, every time, and don't tell me about the years you've got on the rat, because the dust doesn’t keep score. We follow the rules because the people who didn't are not here to write newsletters about it.

We’re building something real. You don't get to keep only the parts that flatter you. The butterfat and the hantavirus are both a part of this. A serious industry holds both without dropping either. I would rather we be the people who look straight at it in issue five, while we are small, then be the people who are exposed in conspiracy l and spin.

So put on the gloves. Wet the floor. Respect the dust. Go back to work, because the work is still worth it, and the math, even with the gloves on, still doesn't lie.

Stay bold, my friends.

—BigCrazyBaldhead