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

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.

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.

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.

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?’