Page 280 - The Welfare of Cattle

ethICaL IMPeratIVe of TELOS 257

DAIRY BOOSTERISM AND THE PASTORAL IDYLL OF DAIRY FARMING
The desire to see animals outdoors and on pasture is deeply embedded in the societal
consciousness of what a “good life” for farm animals should look like in the United States
(and elsewhere). The industries clearly recognize this. Marketing efforts (dairy “boosterism,”
as it were [see DuPuis, 2002]) within the dairy industry have historically cultivated dairying
as an inherently pastoral pursuit, in so doing positioning the dairy sector as relatively immune
to some social and activist concerns about industrialization, intensification, and denaturing
that confront other livestock sectors (DuPuis, 2002; Molloy, 2011).
As far back as the 19th century, antebellum social reformers envisioned and sought to
position milk and its production as a solution to the perceived moral depravities of indus-
trialization and social ills befalling newly formed cities, constructing milk as a perfect
food that would aid city dwellers in escaping the ills plaguing urban life. Public health
officials extolled milk as “the modern elixir of life,” describing it as “the most nearly
perfect of human foods for it is the only single article of diet which contains practically
all of the elements necessary to sustain and nourish the human system,” (Crumbine and
Tobey, 1930). See also the writings of one William Prout, who in 1802 described milk
thusly: “Of all the evidences of design in the whole order of nature, milk affords one of the
most unequivocal. No one can doubt for the moment the object for which this valuable fluid
is prepared.” Scholars (see DuPuis, 2002) follow the positioning of milk as wholesome and
clean into 20th- and 21st-century marketing—themes that are underscored with the impli-
cation that dairy is a wholly natural product. That theme of nature boosterism has marked
not only the end product of dairying, but the production process itself. Enter the dairy cow,
and her position in a green, utterly (udderly?) natural landscape to produce the ultimate,
perfect, natural food.
At first glance, depicting dairy cattle on pasture makes perfect sense from an
advertising perspective, as such imagery appears to fulfill a latent urge to return to
nature for many people both within and external to the dairy industry itself (see section
“Societal Perceptions of Cow Welfare and telos”). Even dairy farmers, when surveyed,
indicate that they too would love to see more cattle on pasture (Schuppli et al., 2014).
This collective desire for the pastoral carries through even to the labels adorning dairy
products, for example, through label design (e.g., rolling hills and bucolic landscapes) and
even the brand name itself (e.g., Organic Valley, Meadowbrook). Such messages seem to
subconsciously reinforce collective societal and agrarian ideals relative to cows living
their lives outdoors on verdant pastures. Television commercials have done likewise:
see, for example, the enormously successful “Happy Cows” campaign for California
Milk in the early 2000s, in which anthropomorphized talking cows conducted intimate
social lives on Californian rolling hills. That notion of “the cute cow” is, as DuPuis
writes, “an American cultural phenomenon in itself…all of these cute cows represent a
friendly, controllable, yet natural provision system, a sort of identity-based pastoral ideal”
(DuPuis, 2002, p. 235). Agrarian imagery likewise abounds in dairy advertising, through
depictions of quaint red barns situated against rolling hills, more realistic and perhaps
depersonalized silhouettes of cattle embedded into the landscape alongside the farmer,
and farming families portrayed as working in close partnership with their cows. These
portrayals are “reminiscent of the romantic pastoral images of the mid-19th century, in
which the tending milkmaid represented the care of nature [by which such] discourses
emphasize agrarian values and cooperation between the farmer and the consumer, and
farmer and nature” (DuPuis, 2002).