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No Such Thing as Happy Cows

As THE ONLY SON OF THE FOUNDER of the Baskin-Robbins ice cream empire, I grew up eating plenty of ice cream and being groomed to take over the family business. It was painful for me to face the fact that the sale and consumption of ice cream was contributing to rising rates of heart disease and obesity. And it was even more painful to learn that ice cream was made from milk that was produced at the cost of tremendous suffering for the dairy cows and their calves. Instead of following in my father's footsteps, I turned away from the family business and committed myself to working for a more compassionate and healthy world.

In my books, including Diet for a New America and The Food Revolution, I detail the horrific abuses suffered by animals like dairy cows and their calves in large-scale animal operations. These books have become international bestsellers, which has reinforced my belief that these are issues of importance to an increasing number of people.

In 2010, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger signed a bill that prohibits any egg from being sold in the state that comes from caged hens; the bill takes effect in 2015. This bill became law twenty months after a 63 percent majority of California voters approved Proposition 2, the Prevention of Farm Animal Cruelty Act, which made it clear that concern for the living conditions of livestock is no longer the province of animal rights activists alone.

Recognizing that concern about the humane treatment of farm animals has been growing, the California Milk Advisory Board proceeded to ramp up its ten-year “Happy Cow” advertising campaign with a new series of ads proclaiming: “Great milk comes from Happy Cows. Happy Cows come from California.” These ads are now being shown across the nation.

Unfortunately, there are a few problems with the ads. For one, they aren't always 100 percent loyal to the truth. As an example, they weren't filmed in California at all. They were filmed in Auckland, New Zealand.

Unfortunately, that's just the tip of the iceberg.

The California Milk Board has suffused the state with billboards and other ads proudly proclaiming that 99 percent of the state's dairy farms are family owned. But in order to arrive at this figure, they include each and every rural household in the state that happens to have one or two cows, and calls each of them a dairy farm. In this calculation, each of these households is counted as a single dairy farm and given the same weight as a corporate-owned dairy in the San Joaquin Valley that has 20,000 cows. Consumers reading the billboards and other ads may think that most of the state's milk comes from family farms when, in fact, 95 percent of the milk produced in the state comes from large corporate dairies.

Thanks to the practices these corporate dairies employ, the amount of milk produced yearly by the average California cow is nearly 3,000 pounds more than the national average. This increased production may seem like a good thing, but it is achieved at great cost to the animals. The cows are routinely confined in extremely unnatural conditions, injected with hormones, fed antibiotics, and in general treated without compassion like four-legged milk pumps. The ads portray California's cows as happy when, in actuality, one third of California's cows suffer from painful udder infections, and more than half suffer from other infections and illnesses.

The natural lifespan of a dairy cow is about twenty years, but California's dairy cows are typically slaughtered when they are four or five years old, because they've become crippled from painful foot infections or calcium depletion, or simply because they can no longer produce the unnaturally high amounts of milk required of them.

It's hard to see how the life of the average California cow today could legitimately be considered to be a happy one, which raises a few questions. Are we going to hold our advertisers accountable to reality? Are we going to ask that what they tell us bears some resemblance to the truth? The California Milk Advisory Board has built an advertising campaign that portrays the life of these animals as one of ease and comfort. The Milk Board is pleased with the Happy Cow ads, and is pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into presenting them to the nation. But is this ad campaign deceiving consumers?

The ads—with slogans like “So much grass, so little time”—present the California dairy industry as a bucolic enterprise that operates in lush, grassy pastures that look remarkably like, well, New Zealand. It sounds nice, except for the fact that California's dairy industry is concentrated in the dry and barren Central Valley. Here, the cows are typically kept in overcrowded dirt feedlots. Some never see a blade of grass in their entire lives.

Perhaps a more accurate slogan would be: “So many cows, so little space.”

The ads show calves in meadows talking happily to their mothers. But the reality is a little different. Male calves born to California dairy cows typically spend only twenty-four hours with their mothers, and some do not even get that much. They are then taken from their mothers to be slaughtered, or condemned to languish tethered within the small confines of veal crates.

The ads happily give the impression that the practices of the dairy industry are in harmony with the environment. But once again, this lovely picture isn't entirely accurate. The 1,600 dairies in California's Central Valley produce more excrement than the entire human population of Texas. The amount of waste produced each year by the dairy cows in the fifty-square-mile area of California's Chino Basin would make a pile with the dimensions of a football field and as tall as the Empire State Building. When it rains heavily, dairy manure in the Chino Basin is washed straight into the Santa Ana River. A considerable amount of it inevitably makes its way into the aquifer that supplies half of Orange County's drinking water.

One thing the Happy Cow ads never mention is that 20 million Californians (65 percent of the state's population) rely on drinking water that is threatened by contamination from nitrates and other poisons stemming from dairy manure. Nitrates have been linked to cancer and birth defects.

It's been said that “ignorance is bliss,” and it may be that a certain level of happiness is possible when we don't look too closely at things that make us uncomfortable. The Milk Board, which seems to thrive on our ignorance, never gets around to mentioning that genetically engineered bovine growth hormone is widely used in California's largest dairy operations to increase milk production. Nor that the hormone is banned in many countries—including Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and much of the European Union—because it increases udder infections and lameness in the cows, markedly raises the amount of pus found in milk, and may increase the risk of cancer in consumers.

Many consumers today are willing to pay extra for products that have been produced humanely and with respect for the environment. If someone produces eggs from free-range chickens, they can get a higher price in the marketplace than they could for conventionally produced eggs. If someone makes bread made from organically grown wheat, they can get a higher price for it. But what if someone were to tell the public that their eggs were free-range when this was false, or were to tell the public that the wheat in their bread was organic when this wasn't true? Would their actions be considered dishonest? Would they be seen as attempting to take unfair advantage of the public? Might their dishonesty even be considered criminal? Why, then, do we allow the Milk Board's Happy Cow ad campaign to portray California dairy products as humanely produced in harmony with the environment? Why do we allow them to take advantage of the people who care enough about this precious Earth and the life it holds to pay a higher price for foods produced with respect for life?

The Milk Board defends the ads by saying they are entertaining, and are not intended to be taken seriously. However, the Milk Board does not appear to me to be in the entertainment business. Is it spending hundreds of millions of dollars on this ad campaign to amuse the public, or to increase the sales of California dairy products?

The Milk Board says the ads show talking cows, and no one thinks cows talk. Therefore, they conclude, the ads are not misleading. They are right, of course, that no one in their right mind thinks cows talk. And they are right that their ads do not mislead people into believing they do. But I am not aware of a movement of consumers demanding animal products from talking animals. There are, however, a large number of consumers who care about animals and the planet, and who are willing to pay extra for humanely raised animal products and products raised in Earth-friendly ways.

The Milk Board knows that showing calves being ripped away from their mothers and confined in tiny veal crates won't sell their product. Neither will showing emaciated, lame animals that have collapsed from a lifetime of hardship and over-milking being taken to slaughterhouses and having their throats slit. But this is the sad reality of the California dairy industry. Covering up this misery with fantasy ads of happy cows does nothing to alleviate the suffering these animals endure.

This is why I have joined with People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) in a lawsuit that challenges the Milk Board's ads as unlawfully deceptive. To my eyes, it is inhumane to inflict widespread suffering on cows and their calves. I consider it inexcusable to poison the state's ground-water basins. And I think it is dishonest to deceive caring consumers about this animal suffering and environmental devastation. Thus I would feel irresponsible if I sat by and did nothing while the Milk Board continues to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on their Happy Cow ad campaign.

After joining the lawsuit, I was interviewed by a skeptical reporter, who asked some provocative questions about my participation. A portion of our dialogue follows:

Question: Don't you think the ads are funny?

Answer: I think they are clever, but as someone who takes animal suffering seriously, I don't find them humorous. There's nothing funny about cruelty, and I don't think that misleading the public becomes legitimate when it is done in an “entertaining” way.

Question: You are joined in this lawsuit by PETA. Aren't your complaints about the ads something that only animal rights advocates would make?

Answer: Consumers who want the animal products they buy to be from humanely raised animals can be found in every segment of society. McDonald's has recently increased the size of the cages in which their chickens are kept, and decreased the number of birds in the cages. They have made this change at considerable cost, because they recognize the strength of the market demand from their customer base for more humanely raised poultry. Burger King and Taco Bell have made similar changes. The customer bases for these fast-food franchises are not made up of animal rights advocates. On the contrary, they are composed of mainstream Americans. Consideration for the plight of animals is a central part of the American character. It is an essential part of who we are as a people. Abraham Lincoln was not speaking only for animal rights advocates when he said: “I care not much for a man's religion whose dog or cat aren't the better for it.” I think the Happy Cow ads are an insult to the legitimate humanitarian concerns of millions of people.

Question: Are you joining this lawsuit because you are a vegetarian?

Answer: No. Being a vegetarian is a personal choice. It is not a personal choice whether you tell the truth about products you are marketing to the public. In fact, it is the non-vegetarian population that is more the victim of this ad campaign. Many vegetarians do not consume any kind of dairy products, so this kind of false advertising actually affects them less.

Question: Aren't all ads like this? When I buy a beer, I don't expect to get two women in bikinis standing next to me.

Answer: It's true that many ads exploit the desires of people for happier and more exciting lives. But to me, the Happy Cow campaign seems uniquely irresponsible. Our society is not experiencing a concerted and serious social movement composed of people from all walks of life demanding that commercial beer products come with women in bikinis. There is, however, exactly that kind of movement demanding that dairy and other animal food products come from humanely treated animals and environmentally sustainable practices.

Question: The ads imply that California cows are treated better than cows in other states. Is this true?

Answer: No. The reality is actually the opposite. California's dairy industry is concentrated for the most part in the dry Central Valley, which is now the number one milk-producing area in the United States. Here, the cows are typically kept in dirt feedlots, unlike the green pastoral fields common in Wisconsin, for example, where there is much higher annual rainfall. California dairy cows are kept in larger numbers in smaller areas than anywhere else in the country.

Question: What are you trying to accomplish with this lawsuit?

Answer: We are asking the court to take animal suffering seriously, and to put a stop to these deceptive ads. Furthermore, I would like to see the dairy industry make amends and make an effort to rectify some of the damage done by the ads. For example, I would like to see the Milk Board pay fines at a level commensurate with what they've paid for the Happy Cow campaign. And I'd like to see that money used to fund a public service educational campaign to educate people of all ages about the importance of preventing cruelty to animals.

Question: What is the current status of the lawsuit?

Answer: Thus far, the Milk Board has prevailed in court. Why? Because the California Milk Advisory Board is the marketing arm of the California Department of Agriculture, which is a government agency. And in California, in a truly Orwellian twist, government agencies are exempt from laws prohibiting false advertising.

Question: If the courts won't step in and protect us, what can we do?

Answer: I think it's time for consumers to stop rewarding this behavior with our hard-earned dollars. I think it's time for us to withdraw our support from industries that mislead us and whose practices are cruel to animals. I think it's time for us to understand that, when it comes to factory farms, there are no happy cows.