Last week, there was a bit of a media flurry about a very significant lawsuit against Cooperatives Working Together (CWT), an organization of many of the big dairy companies (including Land O Lakes). Filed by Seattle law firm Hagans Berman Sogol Shapiro, the suit accuses California dairy producers of slaughtering 500,000 healthy dairy cows in order to reduce the supply of milk, and thus, drive up the price. Estimates peg the profits from this illegal price fixing at $10 billion from 2003 to 2010.
CWT slaughtered the dairy cows, using the term ‘dairy herd retirement’ to cover what was the slaughter of healthy and productive cows. Animal advocacy group, Compassion Over Killing (COK) was the organization who discovered the link between the slaughter of the cows and dairy prices.
There was an article about this in the Seattle PI, as well as in a range of other news publications. As I’ve been following the story, I’ve noticed a number of really interesting issues here. The suit itself is grounded on the price fixing that impacted American consumers purchasing dairy products and so in the public consciousness, this suit is not really about the animals but about the effects on consumers. From a perspective that considers the animals (like COK’s), the slaughter of the half million health dairy cows was ethically unsound to say the least. But I can’t help but think that this is not so far off from the way the dairy industry functions on a good day.
Dairy cows are kept alive only so long as they are reproductively productive. When they are no longer producing substantial quantities of milk (usually after just a few years), they are slaughtered for the meat industry. Big dairy has encouraged the public to think that dairy production is benign–afterall, the cow is not directly killed to obtain milk, as is the case with meat. However, the connection of dairy production with the systematic slaughter of animals is inseparable: male calves born to dairy cows are often slaughtered for veal or raised for beef, and ‘spent’ dairy cows are most often turned into ground beef. Lots of interesting and tough dimensions to this suit.
This being said, I am delighted by the law suit, as it draws attention to the workings of the dairy industry. The power of law here is inspiring and I’ll be interested to see how the suit progresses. Any thoughts?
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if we just stop purchasing dairy products…think of what an impact that might have.