Milking it for all it is worth

When we are young, we are told to believe a few things, without question. We are told our bed time. We were told to always eat our vegetables and we are told that if you don’t drink your milk you won’t grow up to be a strong boy. Sorry to your mother and father, but the part about milk is complete Hogwash. Milk has done a lot to make you believe “Milk Does a body good!” They have donated millions to Washington lobbyist. They have made celebrities endorse and convince you that milk will make you a superstar athlete or actor .Now if that is not bad enough, they have the world believing that milk is the only source of calcium know to man and that it is good for you to consume. In my paper I will discuss the propaganda operation the milk companies have put on the everyday consumer and why milk is bad for you. I will also discuss the cruel and torturous practices milk farmers, put their cow through. This is going to be forage into the world of milk and the harm it does to do the everyday milk-drinker here in America.
People are not the only animal struggling here in America. The Milk cow has gone through an immense amount of torture for our consumption. The average milk cow’s life is 25 years. The average milk cow in America lives to be 3 or 4. This is because of the terrible cycle the milk cow is put through. Cows produce milk because they have to nature their young, just like humans do. So on the first day of the new calves life, he is ripped away from his mother and fed a milk substitute, that contains calf blood, than if the calf is lucky enough to become a milk cow, it will than eventually be introduced to the vicious cycle of milk production. The cycle starts when the cow turns 1 year of age. It starts in the beautiful setting of a concrete room and a small stall, where the cow is forcefully artificially inseminated by the farmer. After given birth, cows lactate for 10 months. So after the rip the calf away from the mother, they hook up the cow to a machine for about 10 months, which pumps the cow for its milk. This will be the life a milk cow knows until it can’t do its job and they bring it out back and euthanize it around the tender age of 3 or 4. If you are a male calf, your luck is no better. The farmer ties you up and makes sure you are unable to move and then give you the cute title of “Veal”, not tied up baby cow, like it should be. If this was the worst of it, I probably could deal with it, but this is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to milk production, by today’s dairy farmer.
Here is a little riddle for you. How can Milk production go up from 116 billion pounds to 170 billion pounds, while the number of milk cows is 8 million cows, down from 14 billion milk cows in 1950? The answer my friend, is drugs, genetic manipulation and artificial hormones, that makes a cow a milk producing machine. The average milk cow, which has not been fed these super drugs produce about 16 pounds of milk a day, enough to feed their young. A super cow produces up to 50 pounds of milk a day. These drugs make the cow suffer immensely. They become infected with a disease called Mastitis, which is the number one reason given to the slaughterhouse, when they bring the cow to be slaughtered. This is basically a painful inflammation of the cow’s milk glands, but it has some very interesting side effects on the cow. You cannot look at a cow and tell if there is something wrong with their milk. They do this by taking blood and checking the milk’s somatic cell count or SCC. The SCC consists of all stuff shed from the cow’s udder, which include white blood cells or more commonly known as pus. The government does however regulate how much of this pus can be in our milk. But like with most things there is a loophole to the rule. If the milk has more than the allowable amount of SCC or Pus, the way the farmers can make the milk drinkable is by adding more milk until the number is acceptable. They say it is rare for milk not to pass inspection. So to summarize the paragraph, the Food and Drug administration is letting us and our children drink an allowable amount of pus. God bless the USA.
They myth of milk and calcium is quite the crazy situation. In a study, even though American woman consumed more calcium than woman in China, they were still at a higher risk of developing Osteoporosis. One of the differences between the two people was their source of calcium. The American woman drank milk, which builds strong bones; I mean we all have seen the build boards and the Chinese woman got their calcium from plant sources. The milk lobby also spends millions of dollars on convincing people that they need milk after they are infants. Humans and animals humans feed are the only species on this planet that consume milk after infancy. These two points are where the milk propaganda machine comes in. They spend millions upon millions of dollars convincing us we need milk in our everyday life. They have created groups to lobby congress to pass food disparagement laws like the one under which, American superhero, Oprah Winfrey was sued in Texas for. She made a comment about beef and she got sued. This is how powerful this lobby is. If they can go after Oprah, without anyone caring, what chances does the average consumer have?
They have used various Logical fallacies to convince us milk is a healthy and a nutritious drink for the everyday person to drink. Their most famous advertisement campaign with our question is the “Got milk?” campaign. This campaign uses celebrities, famous people and super athletes for their appeal. They then have them wear a fake milk mustache and take a picture and plant the words “got milk?” somewhere on the advertisement. Got milk slogan is a blatant use of accentus, which is a fallacy that uses an ambiguous phrase that is constantly mentioned as if it is true. The athlete is used as an Argumentum Ad Verecundiam which is the argument that simply breaks down to if Tiger Woods is seen drinking milk in an advertisement, maybe if I drink milk, I can hit the ball like he does. Even though it is widely know that not everybody that drinks milk will be able to hit the ball like Tiger Words, but the milk companies play on our love of famous actors and superstar athletes
Milk is one of the most dangerous products we consume as consumers in America, yet the milk industry is growing and making profits. Cow’s milk is designed for baby calves that have four stomachs and grow 100 pounds in a few short months and we wonder why we have a problem with childhood obesity. There is also an allowable amount of Pus in our milk, but we still drink it. We know that there are other sources of calcium, some even better than milk and yet we still drink milk. This has to do with the lobby in this country and the millions upon millions of dollars milk spend on advertising and tricking us into thinking we need them. It is science that milk is bad and until this information is widely accepted, they will continue to implore even worse practices on their cows. The scariest thing about this whole milk problem is that they have no problem slowly poisoning and lying to us, right to our face about the benefits of Cow’s milk.

References
1. D. Feskanich et al., “Milk, Dietary Calcium, and Bone Fractures in Women: A 12-Year Prospective Study,” American Journal of Public Health, 87 (1997) 992-97.
2. U.S. National Library and the National Institutes of Health, “Kwashiorkor,” Medline Plus Medical Encyclopedia, 13 Jun. 2006.
3. Anne Karpf, “Dairy Monsters,” The Guardian 13 Dec. 2003.
4. Don P. Blaney, “The Changing Landscape of U.S. Milk Production,” Statistical Bulletin Number 978, U.S. Department of Agriculture, Jun. 2002.
5. Morten Dam Rasmussen et al., “The Impact of Automatic Milking on Udder Health,” Proceedings of the Second International Symposium on Mastitis and Milk Quality (Vancouver: 2001).