Monday, November 19, 2007

Not So Happy Cows?


I’m sure a lot of you have been watching your favorite TV show and you came across a “Happy Cows in California” commercial. If you watched closely, you’d realize they’re actually saying our own Midwestern cows produce bad milk products and suffer in the cold. They show the California Cows on a grassy hillside with lots of trees all warm and cozy singing and discussing the great pleasures in California. Then they show a Midwest cow in the snow freezing to an icicle heading for California to be so called “Happy.” This leads you to believe that all the cows in California are really happy and warm and we torture cows in the Midwest in the cold and they produce bad milk. Well this is in fact very untrue.
I looked some information up on the internet about these so called “Happy Cows.” Right away I had about 10 hits against the California cow’s campaign. The California Milk Advisory is in fact lying to consumers about the way cows are treated on dairy farms in California. California’s dairy cows are crammed into huge lots, where they live covered in mud and their own feces and urine almost their whole miserable lives. They are also pumped full of drugs to keep them producing unnatural amounts of milk. Their udders often become swollen and infected. One third of California’s cows suffer from udder infections and more than half suffer from other painful illnesses and infections. More than a fourth of California’s cows are slaughtered each year because they have become crippled from foot infections or calcium depletion.
I also found an interesting article that was published in the USA Today. PETA is planning on suing the California Milk Advisory Board over its award winning campaign. PETA believes the idyllic conditions portrayed in the ads amount to false advertising. PETA believes the treatment is inhumane. Jim Reynolds the professor of veterinary science at the University of California disagrees with PETA. He claims the cow’s lives are in fact not horrible, and forty-fifty percent of California dairy cows are raised in dairies built in the past two to three years, in which cows are well cared for so they can produce more milk. Everybody obviously has a different opinion in the situation. I asked DJ what he thought. “My parents went to California and they are all brown, ugly, packed in tighter than heck cows.” “I don’t feel bad but they shouldn’t make ads saying how great they are.”

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