The Good Fight

We can still speculate on how much the weather may change because of global warming, but there’s no doubt about the severity of the storm coming to dairy farms over livestock care.

The Humane Society of the United States has been emboldened by its many recent state-level successes in imposing animal welfare restrictions in places including Colorado, Arizona, and last November in California, where the Proposition 2 ballot initiative passed by a wide margin. While most such state initiatives have not directly targeted specific dairy production practices, these victories have created a climate of dread among farmers in other states, and also given rise to yet more such proposals. For instance, California’s state legislature is considering new laws that would ban tail docking of dairy cattle, and restrict the use of antibiotics in food animals. Right now, livestock agriculture is playing defense on a variety of lines of scrimmage across the country.

To compound matters, HSUS is trying to broaden its coalition beyond the usual animal rights/liberal activists nexus. None other than Rush Limbaugh, certainly the loudest voice of today’s conservative movement, has basically bought into the notion that the animal rights community is doing a better job of promoting proper stewardship of livestock than farmers are. (You can listen here to an audio clip of Limbaugh praising HSUS). You know we’ve stepped through the looking glass when farmers are perceived, at least by some, as being the opposite of good, morally-upstanding stewards of God’s creation.

It’s no secret that those of us involved in animal agriculture need to play offense, and we need to improve the level of our game ASAP. For one, farmers themselves need to step up and help communicate less about animal science, and more about human values. Where the animal rights community has had its greatest success is in painting production agriculture as devoid of shared human values, which includes concern about reasonable animal care. We tend to respond most frequently with science-based, as opposed to values-based, messages. For more on the imperative need to humanize our messages, I recommend reviewing a recent presentation at the National Dairy Leaders Conference. You can click here to download a file from Charlie Arnot of CMA Consulting, who did an excellent job of framing the public debate over farming practices.

Another way we’re playing offense is demonstrating the dairy producer community’s collective commitment to proper animal care, using the new Dairy FARM (Farmers Assuring Responsible Management) program. I wrote about FARM a few months ago, and we’re still in the processing of finalizing its program specifics, and explaining how the Dairy FARM program will function within the industry. Suffice to say, we can talk the talk all we want about the good job we’re doing, but ultimately, we also have to walk the walk. This means having a robust, verifiable system that will allow dairy marketers to assure consumers that the milk products they and their families are consuming are produced in a conscientious manner. Implementing Dairy FARM is not going to end the debate over animal stewardship, but it definitely gives us better arguments and more ammunition than we have now.

The other thing I believe we need to look at long and hard at is where we pick our fights. The best example is tail docking. The science says there is no benefit from an animal health or milk quality standpoint to the practice. Obviously, there is a benefit to producers whose cows’ legs and udders are cleaner in the absence of a manure-laden tail switch. The question is whether that benefit is worth the fight over defending a practice used by a minority of dairy herds, and facing increased scrutiny from activists.

Yes, I recognize that docking is done in a way that minimizes distress to cows. And yes, it’s far more defensible than the docking of tails, and ears, of certain breeds of dogs that undergo such practices for purely cosmetic (as opposed to sanitary) reasons. Still, the question remains about whether we want to use significant resources playing defense on this issue, in California or elsewhere, or whether we want to husband our resources for a better fight. There are no easy answers here, other than the best defense is a good offense.

National Milk Producers Federation

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