Yet it is also a co-constitutive and complex affair, of »significant otherness« as Donna Haraway would say, 3 full of interdependencies, entanglements, rituals, and more or less risky transfers of genes and microbial communities. Cattle, etymologically, is derived, via Anglo-French, from medieval Latin capitale – property, capital – it was our value and value in exchange. WWF has previously called for a 40% cut in cow numbers in the Netherlands, saying the sector had outgrown its ability to safely dispose of its waste.Īcross millennia of cohabitation since domestication, our relationship with dairy cattle has always been asymmetric, of course, involving exploitation and cruelty. The government is being urged by MPs and NGOs to come up with a more radical plan for reducing emissions, including halving the country’s livestock population.

Hundreds of Dutch farmers have been protesting against calls to curtail nitrogen emissions from the farming sector. – Henry Colman, as quoted in Chenery 1872 1 The cow stalls, while occupied by the cows, are frequently washed with water … Indeed, the neatness of all their arrangements is perfect. They are generally of a black-and-white color in some cases they are milked three times a day … They remain in pasture all summer, where they are milked but in winter they make a part of the family, and, in truth, live in the common eating-room of the family, it being a part of the main house. The Dutch cows have been a long time celebrated for their abundance of milk, which does not surprise one in looking at the rich polders in which in summer they are fed, and where they are often seen covered with a cloth as a protection against both the dampness and the cold …. According to Sanz, this is the industry’s »battle against its own ghosts and monsters,« again clashing with the interests of the animals involved.

Today, with increasing ammonia emissions, the industry with its violent modern reproduction methods along with its automated barns is confronted with demands from NGOs for drastic measures: cutting the farm-animal population by half to protect nature and biodiversity. Víctor Muñoz Sanz aims to »think along how we stopped caring about our cows as companions and how to move forward.« Introducing the concept of cow’s ✿ive Freedoms« – freedom from hunger, discomfort, pain, and stress, and to express their natural behavior, he exposes these codes that were released from the UK Farm Welfare Council in the nineteen-sixties as one reason to justify automated solutions for dairy farming. This comprehensive essay looks into the relationship between humans and Dutch dairy cattle, which of course involves exploitation and cruelty.

Milk by Hannah Velten