Her comments and the video (which I found and watched) do reflect horrid conditions, but how many of these films and investigations on how many farms are initiated in order to find one this extreme. In this case, the most objectionable part of the video involves the sadistic farm worker, who is hired help, not an owner or manager.

Instead of looking for the worst in the animal industry, why not try working with and on behalf of dairy farmers, so that they can earn enough income to provide more space, care, bedding, feed, etc., and not have to take shortcuts or medicate animals in order to keep them alive and increase production. And the practices Rosenberg describes ARE NOT universal.

2009 saw the biggest losses in the dairy industry in history. Last week in Copake, NY, a dairy farmer committed suicide. Before turning the weapon on himself, he killed 51 of his cows, the ones that were productive milkers and had to be milked twice a day. No one will ever know his reasons, but I can only guess at the desperation he felt that caused him to take his life. By killing the cows first, he spared them the pain of not being milked when he was not there. He left the remaining herd of younger and nonmilking animals.

Yes, he could have done it differently, but this man must have been pushed to the edge and saw this way out as his only relief. Unfortunately, it came with his life and the lives of the animals he loved.

Perhaps we need another organization, MFDF (Mercy for Dairy Farmers), to support their incredibly difficult and thankless profession and to protect them from people like the investigator, who worked for a year at the subject dairy farm with his only intent being to castigate and defame the industry, and with it, all the dairy farmers who do not deserve such condemnation.

Think of me tonite
For that which you savor
Did it give you something real,
or could you taste the pain of my death in its flavor?
~Wayne K. Tolson, from “Food Forethought”