Deep in the heart of Texas, there is fear. Home of our current president, home of Exxon and home of Enron, it's also the home of a very suspicious cow that is creating something of a stir internationally, but not here. Why, you ask?

Have you ever been right, so right that you wanted to say, "I told you so." And then didn't? That's pretty much the case with Texas cattlemen and mad cows. Once upon a time, you could buy a bumper sticker in Texas that declared, "The only mad cow in America is Oprah Winfrey!"

That was back in 1998. A group of angry cattlemen had taken the queen of daytime television to court in Amarillo, Texas because she had defamed American beef two years earlier.

For those that don't remember 1996, it was the year that the British beef industry was in crisis. On March 26, the European Union had issued a worldwide ban on British beef that was only lifted two years later on November 23, 1998. The so-called Mad Cow disease was suspected of causing a variant form of new variant form of Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease.

So it was less than a month later, on April 16, 1996, Oprah told her television audience: "Mad Cow Disease, it's a medical mystery spreading panic across the Atlantic. In England, 10 puzzling deaths of young people may be linked to a rare and fatal brain disorder in cattle. The afflicted cattle shake and contort like mad dogs before what must be an excruciating and inevitable death.

"In human beings, dementia and paralysis precede death. Scientists speculate that cattle contract the disease by feeding on sheep parts that are infected with another disease — a practice officially banned in England in 1989. Could it happen here?"

Winfrey's guest, fourth-generation cattleman turned vegan Howard Lyman, told the audience, "Absolutely, and what we're looking at right now is we're following exactly the same path that they followed in England. Ten years of dealing with it as public relations rather than doing something substantial about it. One hundred thousand cows per year in the United States are fine at night, dead in the morning. The majority of those cows are rounded up, ground up, turned into feed and fed back to other cows. If only one of them has mad cow disease, it has the potential to affect thousands. Remember today in the United States, 14 percent of all cows by volume are ground up, turned into feed, and fed back to other animals."

Winfrey asked, "But cows are herbivores. They shouldn't be eating other cows."

Lyman replied, "That's exactly right, and what we should be doing is exactly what nature says. We should have them eating grass, not other cows. We've not only turned them into carnivores, we've turned them into cannibals/"