“Respect the Angus” the voice on the Burger King television commercial boomed. Predisposed to do so by my DNA, I stood and saluted. “My, yes, we do,” I said on cue. Which hardly says it at all. In my family, we don’t just respect the Angus, we deify it. A world without Angus would be no world at all; a week without revering the Angus a week without conversation; a day without eating Angus beef a day without sustenance.

You probably think I’m making this up because I’ve got nothing else to write about. Au contraire. Drop by my family home for any holiday gathering and watch in amazement as an ordinary sofa is transformed into the “Couch of Cow Knowledge.” Regardless of the topic conversation – terrorism, the economy, John Kerry or George Bush, the latest gossip in Burlington Junction, Mo., the little hamlet we call home – it will eventually turn back to the family’s esteem for Angus, natural segue or not. It’s no laughing matter, no place for a jab like, “If the plural of fungus is fungi, are two Angus cows called Angi?” Frivolity has no place on the Couch of Cow Knowledge.

Attempts to get the Brothers Dalbey and their offspring to broaden their horizons and talk about something else – newspapers immediately spring to mind – are dismissed. “Let’s move on to something else,” I said once. They assumed I meant to Herefords, which would be like saying I’d just ditched democracy in favor of communism. (What they don’t know is that a friend who does marketing for the Red Angus Association of America has just supplied me with Red Angus pens, Red Angus notepads, Red Angus refrigerator magnets and other Red Angus marketing gimmicks that will find their way into their birthday cards. And aligning with the Red Angus group is worse than aligning with the communists, or Herefords.)

Once, when my friend Ukrainian friend Borys visited the Dalbeys with me at Christmastime, international relations nearly went back into the deep freeze. Borys is from L’viv, a city of about 778,900 people, and he was merely trying to make conversation with American farmers with whom he had little in common when he asked one of my brothers, “What are you doing about mad cow disease?” My brother spluttered, almost spraying us at the breakfast table with chocolate milk, and thundered undiplomatically, “WE DON’T HAVE THAT PROBLEM.” And then he refused to join us at Christmas dinner.

Out of a misguided sense of family loyalty, I checked out the fast-food Angus Steak Burger. Smothered with a sickening barbecue sauce, greasy cooked onions and other flavors my palate couldn’t identify, it tasted nothing like the Angus burgers, steaks and roasts I’d been weaned on. I did not respect it. Most of it went into the trash uneaten. The American Angus Association ought to tell the folks at Burger King “thanks, but no thanks” and beg them to quit sullying the good name of Angus. PETA, those animal-rights activists whose respect for Angus would turn the cattle into pets, could do less harm.

We’ll be discussing it on the Couch of Cow Knowledge, to be sure.