There is now a serious, well-funded plan to vaccinate every cow on earth, twice a year, so it burps less politely. Bill Gates is behind it. So is the New Zealand government. Somewhere a marketing department is very proud. The company furthest along calls its methane vaccine the holy grail of livestock emissions, a phrase that should make you reach for your wallet and check it is still there. The pitch is gloriously simple. Train the cow's own immune system to turn on the microbes in her gut, so she belches less methane, with a single jab lasting months. Early results suggest a cut of ten to fifteen per cent. Trials run through 2027, launch around 2030, by which point the dream is a needle in the neck of every cow they can corner. Pause on that. Not a feed tweak. A plan to medicate an entire species, forever, across the whole planet, to fix a problem with how we count its burps. Because methane from a steady herd cycles out of the air within about a decade. It does not pile up like fossil carbon. A stable national herd adds no new warming whatsoever, whatever the headlines shriek. The cow was convicted by an accounting method, and the sentence is a lifetime of injections. And follow the money, because it does the confessing for you. The cash floods in from billionaire climate funds and the food giants chasing their own supply-chain targets, the very people who need the cow to look guilty so their spreadsheets come out green. Not a penny from the farmer, who just inherits the syringe and the bill. So the grass-fed cow, quietly turning rain and sunshine into food on land that grows nothing else, is now a wellness patient with a biannual appointment. Marvellous. The cow was never the emergency. The people insisting she is just happen to have a vaccine to sell.

Activist: "Your cows are putting carbon into the atmosphere." Farmer: "Where did they get it?" Activist: "What?" Farmer: "The carbon. Where did the cow get it before it put it anywhere." Activist: "From... eating?" Farmer: "From eating grass. And where did the grass get it." Activist: "The soil?" Farmer: "The air. The grass pulled it out of the air last spring. The cow ate the grass. The cow breathed some of it back out. It went back into the air it came from." Activist: "But it's still going into the atmosphere." Farmer: "It's going back. There's a difference between a thing going somewhere and a thing going back. You've described a circle and you're frightened of it." Activist: "Then just don't have the cow." Farmer: "The grass still dies in autumn. It rots where it falls. The carbon goes back into the air either way, just without anyone getting fed in the middle." Activist: "It's not that simple." Farmer: "It's grass, cow, breath, grass. Or it's grass, rot, air, grass. Same circle, fewer dinners. If that's complicated for you I'd stay away from the water cycle. That one's got clouds in it."