There hasn't been much in the news lately about Mad Cow Disease and I for one am both relieved and suspicious. Like most everyone else I'm back to eating burgers and ribs, but I can't shake the feeling we're waiting for the other shoe to fall.

Dr. Doolittle talked to cows. They trusted him and told him their thoughts. Perhaps they even shared their ideas on life and the state of animal-human relations. Dr. Doo was a good listener, and I always assumed he'd be a vegetarian. I just can't imagine him sitting down to a rare T-bone steak-it's just too Hannibal Lector.

We could have used the Doc and his empathic powers, recently. We were getting some disconcerting messages from our barn yard critters, and perhaps he could have help us understand why the cows, in particular, were getting sick and threatening to pass it on to us.

Now bovines as a whole aren't known for their verbal communications skills. If you'll pardon the pun, they don't 'shoot the bull' as much as we are led to believe. No generally they're fairly taciturn-lifting their heads slowly to gaze at passing cars, or mooing softly in milk commercials. Sure Elsie the Cow was a bit of a cut-up, but she was the exception.

The average cow in the field probably thinks we keep them around because we like them. It must come as a grim shock when their final 'days outing' in the back of farmer Joe's truck ends at the sausage factory.

I see Dr. Doolittle striding across a farmer's field, deep in green summer grass. The air is fresh and there's hope in the air. But the herd of cattle he's approaching looks anything but hopeful and happy. In fact they're exhibiting all the signs of an extremely high level of unresolved vexation. One might even say they look down right mad.

Our pact with the beastly world began long before recorded history, and without them the human race would never have had the free time to develop important things like nuclear weapons and spandex leisure pants.

Yes, we owe a lot to domesticated animals. We eat them, ride them, make shoes out of them, and keep them as pets to ward off the pain of loneliness. There are probably countless adults in our country who would vote for Lassie, if she ran for office.

I traveled to India a few years ago looking for life's simple answers. It's a good place to go if you want to see a lot of thin people. For the majority of the inhabitants of that country, vegetarian cuisine is both a religious persuasion and an economically imposed life style. Obesity is almost a status symbol. Only the rich can afford to indulge their Epicurean desires. It's not a good place to open a weight loss franchise.

The Hindu people in India show tremendous respect for bovines. You see the big horned Brahman Cattle wandering blissfully through the streets of every small town. They are the local refuse recyclers-munching up any stray bit of edible organic material they find.

And despite the myths we harbor about 'holy cows' wandering aimlessly, I often saw young boys out at dusk leading the family cow back home to be milked.

The prohibition against killing cows strikes me as profoundly practical. For many Indian families the cow's milk is the major portion of their daily protein. If you kill the cow during hard times, you have its meat as a short-term solution. But if you keep it alive, you have milk to survive on, until things improve. And you still have your cow when the crisis is over. It's practical long range planning that maximizes survival strategies-packaged in religious dogma.

Now this symbiotic relationship between man and beast has been beneficial to both sides. We've given them safety and they've given us food. But perhaps our ruminant companions have finally decided to end our ancient agreement.

Perhaps they'd complaint to Dr. Doolittle that we're callously attempting to re-construct them genetically, without really knowing what horror lurks down that accelerated evolutionary path. Or that we sometimes make them eat their own parents, cooked and ground into feed, in the name of maximizing profits.  They might ask the good doctor how people would feel if we were forced to become cannibals.

God may have given us dominion over the animals of the earth and the fowl of the sky-but I doubt those faithful companions on this lonely little ball of dirt thought we'd loose all connection with them as living beings. And I wonder sometimes, how long will it be before we bio-engineer some mutant creature, for the super market, that eats sewage sludge and breaths in toxic air. How would you like to have that on the kitchen table?