Milk Money: Cash, Cows, and the Death of the American Dairy Farm

7. The Animals

T h e A n i m a l s Dueling Narratives If you’re like most Americans, there’s a space in your brain reserved for the image of a dairy farm. You might not realize it, but there’s a battle raging for control of that space. In one corner is the animal rightsmovement,whichwantsyoutopicturepainandcrueltywhen you think of a dairy farm. In the other corner is the marketing arm of the dairy industry. It’s not a fair fight, because the dairy industry merely has to maintain the status quo of your mental picture—that ofaredbarnandagreenfieldandabunchofcowstreatedlikemembersofthefamily .Theanimalrightspeoplehavetobeaggressive.You might even say they need to be offensive to get their message out. It’s hard to imagine an organization named Mercy for Animals (MFA) as being offensive. Aside from perhaps being a great name for a sarcastic punk band,thewordsconnotesoftness,gentility,and goodwill. True, the name is a sort of declaration or commandment, but if you have to ask for mercy, it’s pretty obvious which side of the power structure you’re on, and that tempers the commandment into something more like a plea. In keeping with its name, the organization’s mission is to prevent cruelty to farmed animals and to “promote compassionate food choices”—otherwise known as vegetarianismandveganism.Itdoesthis,mostly,throughconsumer seven 160 Milk Money education,televisionandprintadvertisingcampaigns,research,and grassroots activism. MFA even puts out a magazine—Compassionate Living—twice a year, sprinkled with the fruit of its activism and expert commentary designed to make anything but a non-farmedanimal lifestyle seem less and less morally tenable. MFA’s founder and executive director is Nathan Runkle. Raised on a farm in rural Ohio, Runkle was spurred into this line of work in the wake of a local farmed-animal abuse case in which a piglet was slammed head first into a concrete floor during a high school agricultureproject.Atamerethirtyyearsoldhe’ssortofthewunderkindoftheanimalrightsmovement ,havingstartedtheorganization while in his late teens and grown it into a potent national force with offices in Chicago, New York, Ohio, and Texas. Like People for the EthicalTreatmentofAnimals(PETA),MFA hasleveragedthepower of celebrities toward its cause, using the likes of Bob Barker, Alec Baldwin, and James Cromwell in media materials and voice-overs in documentaries such as Farm to Fridge: The Truth behind Meat ProductionandFowlPlay,anexposeofconditionsonchickenfarms. These exposes are a part of MFA’s most daring and effective strategy : using undercover investigations on farms to show the world how farmed animals actually live. Over the years, MFA has done more than a dozen of these investigations, on everything from fish slaughterfacilitiestoegghatcheries,pigfarms,andturkeyslaughterhouses . And, of course, MFA has done its share of snooping around on dairy farms, too. Its modus operandi is to have an investigator apply for a job on the farm and then wear a hidden video camera to work. Once the investigator has the damning evidence, he quits and applies elsewhere. FortunatelyforMFA,andunfortunatelyfortheanimals,theinvestigations of dairy farms in the past few years have been particularly productive. The first one came out in 2009, when an investigator secured a job at the seven-thousand-cow Willet Dairy, the largest farm of its kind in New York. In a nine-and-a-half-minute video, The Animals 161 available on MFA’s website if you’ve got the stomach for it, the investigator documentsalitanyofbehaviorthat,totheuntrainedeye, smacks of neglect, abuse, and cruelty. There are cows with bloody openwounds,prolapseduteruses,pus-filledinfections,andswollen joints.Workersareseenbeatingcowsandusingelectricprodstoget them moving. Newborn calves are dragged along the ground away from their mothers. In a segment that’s especially hard to watch, calvesare“dehorned”withahotcauterydevice—basically,itburns the horn buds off—without any anesthetic. As you’d expect, these calves writhe in pain and bellow plaintively. Also hard to watch is a worker “tail docking” a calf, which involves cutting the tail off with a tool that looks like a bolt-cutter. The general conditions of the farm are no better, with overcrowded milk sheds and cows lying around on wet, manure-coated concrete floors. Dr. Holly Cheever, a New York–based veterinarian that MFA uses frequently to comment on the conditions it documents, said, “[It] is my professional opinion that the environment that this dairy provides as well as its cattle-handling techniques are improper, unhygienic, dangerous, and inhumane.” MFA scored again in 2010 when its investigator got a job at the two-hundred-cow Conklin Dairy Farm in Plain City, Ohio. Instead of what you might call the...