Cows have rights, that's why I'm paying mine a pension
By Liz Jones
Last updated at 11:31 PM on 27th August 2011 The Daily Mail
Sad
story: The cow provides humans with so much, yet we treat them far from well
I have been thinking a lot about cows over the past few
months. My acute interest came about when I was sent by this newspaper to see a
dairy cow being slaughtered.
She was old in productive terms, but only five or six. She
had given up six or seven of her children at a couple of days old, and every
drop of her milk.
We greedy humans should have been grateful, but how did we
repay her?
She was taken to the abattoir without being milked, so her
huge, swollen udders were painful.
She was terrified, having queued for ages behind other
doomed cows, before she was stunned with a bolt to the head.
The most sickening part was when her front legs were sawn
off while she was still alive.
She kept trying to move her legs away. The slaughterman
called her a ****.
I have never forgotten that image – or the fact that,
because of our supermarkets’ mania for stocking cheap loss-leaders to lure
customers through the door, dairy farmers in this country are subsidised at an
average of £38,000 each a year.
Milk has become as cheap and as tasteless as water. Male
dairy calves mostly don’t even grow up to become meat, as fashion dictates we
want our pound of flesh from a less fatty breed.
Of course, this is not the story you are peddled when you
buy butter or milk. The cows in adverts are usually galloping along a beach,
pretending to be horses, or humiliated by being dressed up in hairnets and
gloves, joyfully operating machinery.
Far
from the truth: The cow in the Muller Corner ad seems all graceful running
along a beach - but the reality is very much different
I love the romanticism of the
adverts for the organic brands: ‘Our cows are allowed to graze freely in lush
pasture.’ Oh la la la. How about the column inches devoted last week to Yvonne,
the runaway cow in Germany, the ‘Scarlet Pimpernel of the bovine world’? No
wonder she’s ‘still on the hoof’, the poor cow. Oh, what a good joke.
The truth is, the dairy industry is not funny at all.
Remember how the Belgians stole from the Congo, and built an
empire? It was possible because of the propaganda brought into play that
Africans are stupid and lazy. The same propaganda is used now against farm
animals, surely the most persecuted creatures in the history of this planet.
Maybe if David Attenborough were to make a documentary
showing the life of the cow or the chicken, how they love and nurture their
young, we would have more sympathy, more insight.
More from Liz Jones...
- LIZ
JONES MOANS: These nits in natty knitwear leave me totally teed off 24/08/11
- Hypnosis
got me back in the saddle! After developing a phobia of her beloved horse
LIZ JONES was willing to give anything a try 21/08/11
- Who'd
have thought we'd miss Cheryl Cole? Liz Jones's verdict on last night's
new X Factor line-up 21/08/11
- LIZ
JONES: Life is supposed to be hard, even if you got three A-stars 20/08/11
- So,
is Mary Queen of Frocks? Mary Portas talks the talk but will her new
fashion line to conceal problem areas for the over- 40s pass the test? 17/08/11
- LIZ
JONES MOANS: Know what I hate most about know-it-all men? 17/08/11
- LIZ
JONES: Trust me Madonna, dating a toy boy makes you look even older 16/08/11
- LIZ
JONES FASHION THERAPY: She dresses the A-list, but how would Rachel Zoe’s
new collection look on you? 14/08/11
- VIEW
FULL ARCHIVE
But in the meantime, I have decided,
with my business partner Isobel Davies, who has a 500-strong flock of rescued
rare-breed sheep and produces non-slaughter wool, to put my money where my
mouth is.
It sounds unlikely, an anorexic dabbling in food, but it’s
for the animals’ benefit, not my own.
My belief is that animals have rights, and one of those
rights is to own their own produce. So the cows own their milk, and chickens
own their eggs.
We have set up a food brand called Cow Nation, which allows
these animals to benefit from their own produce. It will go on sale in
Selfridges in October, with profit going to give the animals an income, and
funding their retirement.
No calves will be killed. Our Jersey herd will produce only
3,000 litres of milk per ten-month lactating cycle, rather than the more common
8,000 or 11,000 litres, if the super-dairies have their way. This unnaturally
high yield inevitably places a strain on the cow, and encourages disease.
If
only: The cows in TV adverts seem like their enjoying life - all a bit surreal
Our produce tastes as it did in the Fifties, with a ‘top of
the milk’, something that, as children, we thought was the height of luxury.
Cruelty-free cream, butter and yogurt will follow.
Our eggs will be from hens that can fund their retirement by
selling us their eggs, which we will market in twos and threes and fours; as
single-person households increase, the traditional half-dozen seems woefully
excessive.
Even organic laying hens are gassed at 72 and sometimes 68
weeks.
Ours will be able to fund their retirement because they have
a commodity we want. It’s simple. We shouldn’t be allowed to steal it.
This new cruelty-free food is expensive. But so it should
be. You don’t need much.
This mania for luxury every day has many casualties: not
just the intensively farmed animals or the farmers in Africa pushed off their
land by pineapple growers, but in the latest obesity figures indicating HALF
the British population will be obese by 2030.
The wonderful farmer who looks after these Jersey cows has
some as old as 16 and 18. He has a herd of juvenile males who will be ‘carried’
by the brand.
These males are rarer than giant pandas or tigers. Why do we
only value the exotic? Why not ‘Save the cow?’