Sheep, Cattle, and Agricultural Science

I was looking through some of the movies I’ve purchased on Amazon recently. I don’t buy a lot of movies, but some are just a little harder to find and worth having on hand. Two of them are western comedies- A Million Ways to Die in the West and Rustlers’ Rhapsody.

What struck me is that both movies have the same core conflict: cattlemen versus sheepherders. It’s a trope that shows up a lot in Westerns, and it often plays like a joke—something about smelly sheep, or cattlemen just finding sheepherders annoying. But in some movies, it feels like there’s an underlying ethnic tension. In Rustlers’ Rhapsody and maybe a few others, the sheepherders seem to be coded as Eastern European, maybe Jewish. That’s an interesting layer, but at its heart, the cattleman-sheepherder rivalry has a real, practical foundation.

It’s agricultural science.

Sheep and cattle graze in the same places—grasslands. Grasslands are great because they’re a stable food source. You put cattle or sheep on a big open range, and they eat. Simple, right? Not quite. The problem is how they eat.

Cattle munch. They eat the blades of grass, chewing it down, but leaving the roots intact. The grass grows back quickly. Sheep, on the other hand, yank the whole thing up—roots and all. Over time, this destroys the grasslands. Eventually, the grass can grow back, but not fast enough for cattle to return within a reasonable time.

So when a cattleman sees a sheepherder moving in, it’s not just a personal grudge—it’s survival. If sheep go through an area, the land becomes unusable for cattle, maybe permanently. That’s the real reason you see this conflict show up again and again in Westerns. It’s not just about smell or stubbornness—it’s about the land itself.

Confederate Surrender Day: Traitor Generals and the Worst Participation Trophy Ever

Ah, the Confederacy—the biggest bunch of sore losers in American history. Not only did they start a war to keep people enslaved, but after losing, they somehow still managed to get military bases named after them. Because nothing says "land of the free" like honoring men who fought to destroy the country. But don’t worry, the U.S. military has finally started scrubbing their names off the map, so let’s take a moment to run some numbers and see just how much damage these traitors managed to do before their well-earned defeat.

Confederate Generals and Military Bases

For decades, the U.S. had military bases named after these nine Confederate losers:

1. Henry L. Benning (Fort Benning, Georgia) – Pro-slavery extremist, great guy.

2. Braxton Bragg (Fort Bragg, North Carolina) – Universally despised even by his own side.

3. John Bell Hood (Fort Hood, Texas) – Led his men straight into destruction, repeatedly.

4. Leonidas Polk (Fort Polk, Louisiana) – A bishop who thought Jesus was cool with slavery.

5. John Brown Gordon (Fort Gordon, Georgia) – Later became a Klan leader. Lovely.

6. Ambrose Powell Hill (Fort A.P. Hill, Virginia) – Died still thinking the Confederacy would win. Adorable.

7. George E. Pickett (Fort Pickett, Virginia) – His "charge" was basically the Civil War’s version of running with scissors.

8. Edmund Rucker (Fort Rucker, Alabama) – A cavalry guy who helped burn stuff down for fun.

9. Robert E. Lee (Fort Lee, Virginia) – Turned down an offer to be the field commander of the US Army, worst career decision ever.

Civil War Casualties and Proportions

The Civil War remains the deadliest conflict in American history, with 698,000 deaths. Let’s divvy that up among these nine Confederate figures:

698,000 deaths ÷ 9 generals = 77,556 deaths per general

Imagine being so committed to an evil cause that you're statistically linked to 77,556 deaths. Now let’s zoom out.

Deaths as a Percentage of the 1860 U.S. Population

Back in 1860, the U.S. population was 31,443,321. So let’s see how much of the country the Confederacy managed to help kill:

(698,000 ÷ 31,443,321) × 100 = 2.22% of the U.S. population

And per general:

(77,556 ÷ 31,443,321) × 100 = 0.247% of the U.S. population per general

Each of these clowns was mathematically tied to about a quarter of a percent of the entire country’s population. Truly inspiring—if you’re into mass death and treason.

Drawing Parallels to the COVID-19 Pandemic

Fast forward to today, where another historic tragedy unfolded—this time, through a virus rather than bullets. The 2025 U.S. population is estimated at 341,145,670. So if we apply that 0.25% figure:

0.0025 × 341,145,670 = 852,864 people

And wouldn’t you know it? The U.S. hit 852,864 COVID-19 deaths in early 2022—almost the same fraction of the population that each of these Confederate generals contributed to through sheer arrogance, incompetence, and cruelty.

Final Thoughts

Numbers don’t lie, but people sure do. The Confederacy was not noble, not misunderstood, and certainly not worthy of honor. Their cause was slavery, their methods were brutal, and their legacy was failure. Yet somehow, their names got slapped on military bases meant for the actual defenders of America. Fortunately, history has a way of course-correcting, and their names are finally being removed from places of honor.

So, let’s take their memory and put it where it belongs—deep in the footnotes of history, right next to "horrible ideas that got a lot of people killed."

A Slap Update: Do I Still Have That Blog?

"Hey man, do you still have that blog?"

"Yeah, I think I do... although I don’t really remember the last time I put anything in it."

"Are you kidding me? You basically wrote nothing all of last year, just posting pictures of naked ladies.”

“Surely that’s not true."

"Oh yeah? Go take a look."

Time passes.

"Holy shit. You’re right. I basically just posted naked people."

"Yeah, as if the internet doesn’t have enough of that. What the hell were you doing?"

"Don’t know. I think I got tired of writing. I spent all my day at work writing. It’s exhausting."

"Yeah, but now you finally figured out how to dictate voice-to-text, feed it through AI, and let it make sense of your rambling, right?"

"Oh yeah. We’re doing that right now."

"That’s right. So, you know, writing is not as painstaking as it used to be. Why not get back to it?"

"But I’ve got so many cool cowgirl-looking pictures, and people like them."

"Alright. Make yourself a deal. You can only post your weird picture collection on the internet if you attach something that you wrote along with it."

"You mean, like this?"

"Yup."

Feliz Navidad!

 

Happy Thanksgiving 2024!

 

Lumberjacks are OK

 

The two gentlemen of the "perfect phone call"