“I’m not your mother!”: A Story from a California “Livestock” Auction

A day-old Holstein calf stood alone in the auction pen. Tish and I sat in the bleachers waiting for the auction to begin. The auction ring was clean — this was the first auction of the day and the wood shavings lining the floor of the pen had not yet been soiled by animals passing through. The tiny calf stood in the middle, looked around and bellowed. The calf’s persistent cry was the only sound in the room, drowning out the distant noise of gates clanking and other animals bellowing from the pens outside. He was a newborn and his drying umbilical chord dangled from his belly and he was slightly wobbly on his spindly legs.

The man who herded the animals through the auction pen entered the ring with a paddle and leaned on the fence in front of the auctioneer’s platform to chat with the auctioneer. The calf, noticing the man, approached him and gently nuzzled his leg. He stood no taller than the man’s knee and his nose nuzzled at the side of the man’s thigh. In one efficient motion, the man turned and smacked the calf in the face with the paddle he was holding and spoke (much too loudly for the fairly quiet room), “I’M NOT YOUR MOTHER!” The calf ran off, terrified, across the pen.

Tish and I sat, stunned, in the bleachers and watched. The man saw us watching and turned to us and gave us an embarrassed smile and a nervous laugh. I felt compelled, for some reason, to smile back — a thin, forced smile, that I’m sure looked equally nervous. Nervous that if I didn’t smile, I would be identified as someone who didn’t belong. Smiling (or trying to) seemed to be an important gesture to demonstrate I was at ease in that space — not out of place. But my smile and the emotions behind it were nervous for different reasons as well — it revealed that I was nervous that I sat there and did nothing, nervous that I forced myself to smile at this man who responded with such violence to the gentlest attempt at contact from this perfect, tiny calf, nervous that my inaction counted as complicity in a system so thoroughly violent in its mundane, day-to-day operations, and nervous that the book that results from this research would do nothing to change such an ingrained system of exploitation.

The silent awkward moment between us and the man in the pen passed.  The auction started and the calf sold — the first in a string of day-old calves who entered and left the auction pen on wobbly legs, fearful of the men who herded them.  We sat and forced ourselves to watch (to witness), the lump in my throat growing bigger with each animal that passed through the pen and the desperate impulse to buy one of the calves growing stronger with each moment that passed (to just save one from their fate as ‘veal’ would have been something at least).

***

This was a farmed animal auction in the Central Valley of California where calves, cows, and bulls were sold to the highest bidder for the production of dairy and ‘meat’. California is the largest dairy producing state in the country and the Central Valley houses dairy farms with as many as 30,000 cows per farm. Cows used for dairy have to be impregnated annually in order to continue producing milk for the dairy industry and calves are a byproduct of this repeated forced impregnation. Male calves have little to no use to the industry and so are regularly auctioned the day or two after their birth for veal. These calves are removed from their mothers immediately after birth, are sold, and kept (usually confined) for 4-6 months until they are slaughtered. To support the dairy industry is to support the production of veal. This was the story of one of those calves — one stop along his short life in the complex network of dairy and ‘meat’ production.

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