You Tube and Dairy

You Tube and Dairy

David Sparks Ph.D.
David Sparks Ph.D.
There have been so many letters to the editor in the Idaho Statesman lately lashing out at the dairy industry and the so-called ag gag legislation. One of them recently directed readers to go toYouTube and watch “The real price of dairy”. When you go to this video, you see a mother cow with a full utter and a baby calf following her. Then a man comes along and pulls the baby away from the mother and puts the cast into a van and shuts the door. The narrator is a French woman. There are English subtitles which say: “For economic reasons he will not know the taste of his mother’s milk, even for one day. His mother was fertilized to produce milk for the industry, not to feed calves… not even her own calf.” As the video closes, we are sitting inside the van in the back with the calf. The calf’s eyes look terrorized. The van is driving along slowly and the mother cow is following it and bawling. This is a very highly produced video and taken at face value, the viewer can only be appalled. If you talk to people in the dairy industry they are adamant that they care deeply about their animals. I agree, but as a former television host and producer, it seems to me that the dairy industry ought to start producing some high quality videos showing how things are really done. I'm not sure ag-gag is a success shedding light on the truth. To many it’s a message, “we’ve got something to hide.”
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