How about job training for the dairy cows? Maybe they can work as investment bankers?

Big FARMa

Let me get this straight -- the beef lobby saved the cows?

in honor of the cowlilies of the field,
long and peacefully may you live.

afternoon with irish cows
~~~~~by great poet, billy collins

there were a few dozen who occupied the field
across the road from where we lived,
stepping all day from tuft to tuft,
their big heads down in the soft grass,
though i would sometimes pass a window
and look out to see the field suddenly empty
as if they had taken wing, flown off to another county.

then later, i would open the blue front door,
and again the field would be full of their munching,
or they would be lying down
on the black and white maps of their side,
facing in all directions, waiting for rain.
how mysterious, how patient and dumbfounded
they appeared in the long quiet of the afternoons.

but every once in a while, one of them
would let out a sound so phenomenal
that i would put down the paper
or the knife i was cutting an apple with
and walk across the road to the stone wall
to see which one them was being torched
or pierced through the side with a long spear.

yes, it sounded like pain until i could see
the noisy one, anchored there on all fours,
her neck outstretched, her bellowing head
laboring upward as she gave voice
to the rising, full-bodied cry
that began in the darkness of her belly
and echoed up through her bowed ribs into her gaping mouth.

then i knew tht she was only announcing
the large, unadulterated cowness of herself,
pouring out the ancient apologia of her kind
to all the green fields and the gray clouds,
to the limestone hills and the inlet of the blue bay,
while she regarded my head and shoulders
above the wall with one wild, shocking eye.
~~~~
billy collins
picnic, lightning

Thanks, jacqueline, that's a really good one.

How long does a cow live anyway? In my brief sheep farming life, they lived about 7-8 years, maybe longer if they were really lucky. Also, they had a birthrate of a little above 2 per ewe per year (twins were the norm, trips not that uncommon and quads occassional) so if we didn't eat the sheep, the whole planet will be covered in sheep in about 123 years. So all and all, I really didn't feel that bad about eating them.

Killing the cows strikes me as a bad idea. In the next few years, we are going to need a whole lot of government cheese.

Dairy cows live completely miserable lives, especially if they are in the major dairy state, California, where dry lot dairies are the norm. Most dairy cows don't graze, they live in stalls their whole lives, hooked up to machines. Once a year, they give birth to a baby who is taken from them that day so that we can have the milk, which causes them to bellow in grief for days, soon after which they are inseminated to start the process all over again. (Just like humans, cows don't produce milk without having babies. Seems obvious, but no one seems to know it.) By the time they are sent to slaughter, at about 4 years, a fifth of their natural life span, they are depleted and sick, and thus are the most likely animals to become "downers." Remember the Hallmark slaughterhouse case last year? Dairy cows. I have no desire to have the stimulus money go to help either the dairy industry or be withheld to help the beef industry, but as far as dairy cows are concerned, most are probably too miserable to care about the reprieve that everyone seems to think is some kind of cute joke. Animal agriculture in this country is disgusting and abusive. Period

Cows aren't assembly line robots

I'm with Marianne, although things are somewhat less dire for cows here in the northeast. Still, I wonder what people think happens to cows when they stop being productive. I'm quite sure that cow-hugging isn't going to fix the problem - we need to sort out the incentives and find ways to fix the economics of dairy and meat production to encourage more ethical and humane practices. The stimulus bill is not, I think, the place to attempt to make things right.

"so all in all i didnt feel that bad about eating them."

luckily, since cows dont eat people, they dont speak that way about you.
although maybe their giant bellow is a cry of outrage at having to share the planet with us.
that would make sense.

above comment is from me

is there any good news?
anywhere?

it almost seems ironic to see big beef go up against big milk, but the two industries are extremely different. most beef cattle actually spend their lives in pasture, but dairy cattle really are engineered to act as milk-producing robots. dairies are factories.

as a longtime cattle farmer it's not in the least surprising to me to see beef and dairy on opposite sides of an issue, nor for the beef producers to be on the side of sustainability (esp when due to their economic interest).

Beef cattle spend most of their lives in feed lots where they are fed federally subsidized corn and given anti-biotics. While at the same time the feedlots produce tons of waste which is then spread out on other food crops creating solmenella outbreaks. Not only is the beef industry a huge drag on the economy because of all the subsidies the receive but the industry destroys the enviroment and poisons people.
The beef industry might be worse than the tobacco industry at this point.

That retail prices are high while producer prices are low is an indication of overwhelming market power due to concentration in the dairy industry.

If you want milk from cows that get pasture and farms that get a fair price, I recommend Organic Valley. It is a nationwide brand, but that's just a marketing front for a great producers' co-op that provides marketing, processing and technical support to family farms that are pretty small by today's standards. There's even a good chance when you buy their milk that it came from a farm in your state or at least nearby.

It doesn't beat farmers' market milk, but it's better than average by far.

Ironically, spent dairy cows are "culled", the others (that are making too much milk in a declining market) are "retired". Retired to a slaughterhouse - Animal ag will do anything to avoid the word "kill". It's just sickening.

The replicants from "Blade Runner" were "retired." Is agribusiness where they got the lingo from?

Good article Ezra!

Since the first establishment of welfare laws in the 40s and 50s - things have been getting worse and worse for animals.

It really is like Malcolm X said - "if we had full human rights - we would not need civil rights that force us into 2nd grade status indefinitely"?

Animals used to be recognized as subjects - but that was before the Green Revolution and "welfare laws". It was AFTER the welfare laws that we started treating them as objects aka robots.

I actually cannot believe that there are people out there who have read Assimov and still eat meat. After all - Assimov predicted today's situation in the 60s when he wrote his famous article: How many people can the earth handle...

Today - of the 50 billion animals that we enslave annually, (let's face it - animals are not robots but slaves), most of them, ca 45 billion - are children and virgins.

Milk cows, in contrast to chickens, beef and pork animals, are among the very few who are given enough time to reach puberty. At least - milk cows get raped every 9 months in order get pregnant and hence produce milk. At least rape is some form of sexual experience.

99% of animals that we eat, humanely raised or not, are children and virgines.

I want to see a campaign that tackles that:

Stop killing children and virgins for taste.

PS: Try soy milk. We usually give it to the baby cows as mother milk replacement as we steal the cow mother's milk for adult apes (us). Soy milk has no hormones and no antibiotics and is by far more ecological as well - not just merely ethical and healthy.

Another misconception- cows do not need to be continuously milked. If you stop breeding them and milking them, they stop producing!