Shiva had an article in the Manchester Guardian in April consistent with a Kleinian view of the unconscious meaning of cattle.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4164222,00.html
"In India, we hold cattle sacred, because without them we could not renew our soil fertility.
"Ecologically, the cow has been central to Indian civilisation. Both materially and conceptually, Indian agriculture has built its sustainability on maintaining the integrity of the cow, considering her inviolable and sacred, seeing her as the mother of the prosperity of food systems.
"The integration of livestock with farming has been the secret of sustainable agriculture. Livestock perform a critical function in the food chain by converting organic matter into a form that can be easily used by plants. Can you imagine a British agricultural minister saying, as KM Munshi, India's first agriculture minister after independence, did: 'The mother cow and the Nandi are not worshipped in vain. They are the primeval agents who enrich the soil - nature's great land transformers - who supply organic matter which, after treatment, becomes nutrient matter of the greatest importance. In India, tradition, religious sentiment and economic needs have tried to maintain a cattle population large enough to maintain the cycle, only if we know it.'
"The sanctity of the cow as a source of prosperity in agriculture was linked to the need for conserving its integration with crop production. By using crop wastes and uncultivated land, indigenous cattle do not compete with man for food; rather, they provide organic fertiliser for fields and thus enhance food productivity. Within the sacredness of the cow therefore, lies this ecological rationale and conservation imperative."
Apparently, and contrary to what Shiva claims, the idealization does not produce ecologically sound practice:
"Cattle used as money were of course counted by head so that, for monetary purposes at least, quantity has generally though not invariably been more important than quality. The preference for quantity over quality is well illustrated in this account of Negley Farson's contacts with the Wakamba, a Kenyan pastoral tribe, just before the Second World War. Much more recent reports indicate that the attitude displayed by the Wakamba has not materially altered. An agricultural expert had been trying to persuade the tribal chiefs not to keep their old and diseased cattle. In reply one of the Wakamba answered: 'Listen, here are two pound notes. One is old and wrinkled and ready to tear; this one is new. But they are both worth a pound. Well, it's the same with cows'".
"The same regard to cattle is shared by the Masai and, with regard to goats, by the Kikuyu among whom Jomo Kenyatta, the 'father of modern Kenya' was himself reared. The common unfortunate ecological result of this economic characteristic has been a marked tendency towards overgrazing which from time to time has turned grasslands into desert, and which explains why in recent times the introduction of modern money has been stressed by state authorities for soil conservation as well as for other more obvious economic purposes. Attempts to change farming practices to control erosion appear doomed to delay if not failure. Thus in 1938 the economist A.E.G. Robinson stressed the need 'to change the attitude of the native towards his domestic animals that they become not tokens of wealth or a form of currency but a source of income'. The Global 2000 report projects a world increase in cattle of 200 million between 1976 and the end of this century and points out that in the twelve years between 1955 and 1976 Africa's sheep and population increased by over 66 million. ... here one may see the dangerous effects, given the increased pressure of human and animal populations on limited resources, of maintaining one of the oldest monetary systems in the world. In 1983 the new Brandt Commission re-emphasized 'the need to halt and reverse these processes of ecological degradation, which now assume emergency proportions' and estimated the cost of doing so as 'well over $25 billion by the end of the century'. In certain instances, particularly when cattle were used for sacrifices, the quality - 'without spot or blemish' - was important, and in a number of such cases the religious usages of cattle probably preceded their adoption for more general monetary purposes. But there need be no incompatibility in the argument as to the relative merits of quality as opposed to quantity - good or bad, the essence of the argument is that they ere in either case money. Furthermore, they were movable, an immense advantage, forming man's earliest working capital and the linguistic origin not only of our 'pecuniary' from the Latin 'pecus' or cattle, but also our terms 'capital' and 'chattels'. Similarly the Welsh 'da' as an adjective means 'good', and as a noun, both 'cattle' and 'goods'.
"Although these examples of the cultural, ecological and economic relationships of the monetary use of cattle are taken mostly from the modern world, similar problems of overstocking and resalinization, even if on a much smaller scale, occurred in the ancient world also, particularly in Mesopotamia and along the North African coastal area. The latter, once in large part the granary of the Roman empire and more recently feeder of the empty imperial dreams of Mussolini, isnow, despite its vestigial wells which slaked the thirst of the Eighth Army, simply a northern extension of the Sahara." (Glyn Davies, A History of Money, pp. 43-4)