Milk Advisory Board – Our Cows Are Happy!

This is not a real California dairy farm

Color me tickled, the California Milk Advisory Board wants you to know that their member-farms’ cows are happy! Did you know that California cows spend their days surrounded by rolling, green hills and basking in the constantly shining sun? (We may be the Golden state, but we are by no means oppressed by sunlight 365 days a year, who thinks this stuff up?) Anyway, you should know this because the Milk Advisory Board has spent millions on their Happy Cow commercials, including a chance to vote for who should be this year’s Happy Cow. I pity the cow, really. She’ll be quite shocked to discover that the Milk Advisory Board spins a good yarn. (If you aren’t familiar with the Happy Cow campaign: Cows are pictured in bucolic, pastoral settings talking to us intrepid viewers as if we were best friends and they, they are so happy to be on Californian farms, donating their milk, their babies, their livelihood for that glass of milk! We are implored to support them, these happy cows and their kindly human caregivers.)

Here’s what the winner of the Happy Cow competition has to look forward to:

Baby-making: No female’s job is complete until she has little ones running around, right? The dairy industry loves baby cows so much that they’ll keep you constantly pregnant. You might be lucky enough to have a “dry period”in which your uterus can take an itty-bitty break and sorta recover from the pregnancy, birth and 10-month-long heavy lactation period you endured. Mostly, though, you aren’t worth much if you aren’t popping out the calves.

Baby-removal: Just because you get to be pregnant and have like five calves doesn’t mean you get to be a mother. Nope, not on California’s dairy farms! Instead, you’ll endure nine months of pregnancy, labor and then you just try to clean up your baby after birth. Wrong! You will be surprised to learn that your milk isn’t actually meant for a baby cow. That is pure bovine crazy talk. Cow’s milk is meant for humans, dontcha know? I mean, this is collective fact and has been for billions of years since the first amoeba could enslave the first paramecium and steal their microscopic breast milk. It’s practically in our genetic code.

Molestation-nation: If you ever thought your teats were for your baby’s mouth and the distribution of milk, you were clearly drinking the crazy juice. Your teats are for sucking machines to be attached to and massaged dry until your extraordinarily large amount of milk is stripped away and carted off for – hold on to your cow hat – people to drink. Crazy, I know. But true! Your uterus is not your own, your calf is not your own, and your teats and milk are not your own. Still happy?

Milk, Milk, Milk: Now, you may think producing 8-10 gallons of milk a day is absolutely normal. But it is not. It’s a total aberration and funky-weird! If you had been born an Angus, you would have produced 1 gallon of milk a day to feed your growing calf (who would also have gotten to live with you until they got bigger and, tragically, more appealing to the taste-buds of those really, nice farmer people). Some farms will even inject you with a hormone to increase your output – even without it, though, expect to produce tons more milk than is normal. Now, if you are left alone and, say, put out in a field just to nurse your calves and be an awesome bovine, your body would adjust and produce less and less milk. You also wouldn’t keep producing milk – once your baby was fat and happy, old enough to eat grass, you’d stop producing milk. Biology for the win!

Retirement: Now, all happy cows deserve a retirement, right? Well, you will be no different. First, there must be a reason for retirement. Here are the common retirement-worthy reasons most dairy cows give before that golden parachute is theirs: 1) Baby-making machine broken; reproductive problems abound in the dairy industry and, as you get a bit older, your uterus is all no thanks to the baby-making. 2) Mastitis; man, who knew producing 10 times more milk than the average cow would cause so much stress on the udder? Well, it does. Second reason for retirement is that nasty breast infection called mastitis. Between 30-70% of dairy cows will either develop an acute infection or endure chronic cases of infection. If you had been your oddly labeled “beef”cow sister, you’d have a 5-20% chance of getting mastitis, instead of 50%. But you’d also be beef. Oh wait. *ahem* Nevermind.3) Lameness; on most dairy farms, you’ll get to eat the tastiest, fattiest, protein-richest diet on earth – GRAIN! It’s not appropriate for ruminants like you, but hey! Jump for joy, while you can. Grain is so good that it will eat holes in your stomach and restrict blood-flow to your legs, causing lameness and getting you closer to that coveted Club Med spot on the beach!

There is this really nifty organization called Cooperatives Working Together and most of what they do is retire cows – you even have your own AARP!! This year alone, they’ve retired more than 200,000 dairy cows in California. Dairy cows can’t retire fast enough.

Now, the thing about retirement is this: You have to give a little more back to the farmer for retirement. Consider it an investment. All you have to do is get loaded up into metal boxes, shipped to the pre-retirement holding facility called an auction-yard and make some money with your body! After that, it’s retirement for you. And by retirement, farmers actually mean killing you and feeding your body to school kids. I know, doesn’t seem fair, right? But just think, not only have you raised these kids with your breast milk, you can now keep their arteries clogged with your flesh.

Happy Cow, I can’t bear to tell you what happens to your babies. So, stop reading right this moment. It might not make you happy and we just cannot bear to do that to you.

Veal = Baby boy dairy calf, killed between 16-24 weeks of age. Crated calves cannot turn around and they are fed an inappropriate diet. “Rose”veal calves get to run about a bit before they too are, you know, retired. Kind of young for retirement seeing as your average Holstein or Jersey could live to be 15-25 years of age.

Replacement heifers = Girl dairy calves just waiting to replace their Florida-beach bound moms!

So, if I were you, Happy Cow Contestant, I’d run far away from California and all dairy farms. They just want to steal your milk and your babies and then kill you! Generally speaking, this inspires feelings of woe and sadness, not joy.

Now, if you’re a human, let me share a secret with you. For the first 22 years of my life, I drank the breast milk of another species. I know, right? It’s embarrassing and tragic, but it was so normal and still is. So I don’t blame you if you’re all surprised or offended or upset about the dairy industry. My first experience with the dairy industry, which involved me milking cows by the way, was surprising and offensive and upsetting. Please feel those feelings, but most importantly, do something about it. All dairy cows are killed. All of them. And they are not old or dying, they are sometimes young, sometimes middle-aged, and you know what, they all want to live. Their babies are all killed. Their milk is stolen. Their lives, full of such potential, such zest and interest in being alive, are stolen from them. You do not need to be a part of that to survive. Please seek alternatives to dairy products whenever you can.

The happiest cows are on sanctuaries or as companions, friends, (or roaming feral & free). They are respected by their human caregivers, not expected to produce milk or babies or do anything other than get apples, eat grass, maybe frolic and sometimes get poked or prodded for medical purposes (which they generally do not enjoy, and for which, I’m sorry). They have choices and their value does not lie in their udder or uterus, but in nothing more than them, their joy, sadness, anger, jealousy, sympathy, friendships. How lovely it is to just be yourself in a world that respects and understands that. No dairy farm can provide that, not when respect and understanding is always trumped by production output and costs.