In April 1996, at the height of the mad cow disaster in Europe, a former U.S. cattle industry insider appeared on the Oprah Winfrey show and shocked the talk-show diva into swearing she would never eat a hamburger again. For that public act of "food disparagement," Winfrey and her informer, Howard Lyman, aka The Mad Cowboy, were sued for "food slander" by Texas cattlemen ย unsuccessfully. Today Lyman, a vegan, is still a leading food-reform activist ย a fourth generation Montana cattle rancher who sold the family mega-farm twenty years ago (converting some of it to an animal sanctuary) to embark on a public consciousness-raising mission that has included stints as a Capitol Hill lobbyist for the National Farmers Union, President of the International Vegetarian Union, director and spokesman for the Humane Society of the United States's "Eating with Conscience" campaign, and a prized speaker on the vegetarian and animal rights circuit. See Howard Lyman in Winnipeg, October 1st, World Vegetarian Day - and the Tenth Anniversary of the Winnipeg Vegetarian Association - as he kicks off his tour of Western Canada. His talk, "Mad Cow, Mad World," promises to be a lively and thought-provoking guide to "saving ourselves, the planet and the animals, a bite at a time." What I want to be able to do is talk to people about stopping and thinking and not doing some of the stupid things that I did, accepting things that are purely public relations as fact. I want people to realize that they are the captains of their own soul. And if they give me the greatest gift that they can ever give anybody, which is their time to hear what I have to say, I don't want to waste that. I want them to walk away and say "boy you know that's the craziest ex-farmer I ever heard in my life, but he really makes me stop and think." Howard Lyman, July 2003