Keeping a Family Milk Cow

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Photo by Ed Robinson
A millk-producing cow can be a wonderful asset for any homestead.

Keeping a cow is a lot like marriage: It’s a confining and responsible relationship not to be entered into lightly. Flirtation, study, an engagement, even trial marriages are advocated.

Like marriage, too, keeping a family cow is a great institution. In fact, American agricultural writers often refer to the cow as “The Foster Mother of the Human Race.” This is undoubtedly a little over-enthusiastic for in many parts of Europe 80 percent of the milk is goat milk.

The first time you squat on your brand-new, insignificant three-legged milk stool and your cow towers above you, a thousand pounds of the Lord-Only-Knows-What combination of unknown evil, wickedness, and danger and you see her big, horned head turn at the fumbling indignities you are attempting under her hind-quarters, you’re bound to experience a sinking in the pit of your stomach and an intense feeling that a cow is too gigantic an undertaking for you. Anyway, if this feeling doesn’t come over you at the beginning of your first milking, then it will unquestionably at the end when it dawns on you that all that milk, that big pail of milk, is going to be duplicated night and morning every day for the next ten months.

Actually, a cow isn’t large or dangerous. In fact, compared with your car she’s less than one-third the weight, and when you realize that the auto is responsible for some 30,000 deaths a year, not including some hundreds of thousand injuries, then you’ll have to agree that a cow isn’t dangerous. A family cow, particularly a Jersey, becomes the gentlest of pets.

  • Published on Mar 1, 1970
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