Your Dairy Dollars at Work

The bodies of dead baby calves, whether they're dumped in fields or hacked to pieces in the slaughterhouse, are the price of your morning cow's milk, your specialty cheeses, your dairy ice cream, and of course, your veal. In today's news:

Some dairymen have become so desperate that they are not even bothering to haul to feedlots the newborns whose births keep milk flowing at higher levels.

Investigators in San Joaquin County are trying to determine who dumped 30 dead bull calves on country roads to avoid rendering costs or hauling them to auction, where they fetch $5 each but cost hundreds and hundreds more to bottle feed special formula. The group Farm Sanctuary is offering a $2,000 reward for the culprit.

"Apparently it was someone trying to save money who just dumped them," said Susie Coston, the group's national shelter director.

And something else that continues to bother me, enormously, about articles such as the one from which the above extract was pulled is that they keep featuring remarks such as this: "Hundreds of thousands of America's dairy cows are being turned into hamburgers because milk prices have dropped so low that farmers can no longer afford to feed the animals." This should read like this: "Hundreds of thousands of America's dairy cows are being turned into hamburgers a little earlier, a little younger, than usual"--all those dairy cows are going to face horrible slaughter and become hamburger at some point regardless of the current economic woes, and it drives me mad that so many keep ignoring (or conveniently forgetting to acknowledge) that. (See "The Slaughterhouse Is Always the Only Exit for Dairy Cows," a related earlier post on this topic.)

Thanks to Tracy for the alert to the article.

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Photo of calves on conveyor belt, killed during slaughter of pregnant dairy cows: Viva! UK