Is Milking a Cow Just Like Rape?

The Washington Post ran an interesting article this month about animal rights protests at universities that target animal agriculture departments.

The Post focuses on 19-year-old biology major Liz Noppinger who enrolled in a class at the University of Maryland’s College of Agriculture and Natural Resources that involved raising lamb. Noppinger, who is a vegetarian, grew so attached to the lamb that she paid $70 to buy it and sent it to a friend’s farm. As Noppinger told University of Maryland student newspaper The Diamondback,

The person in charge didn’t tell us that they could be slaughtered. Some of the stuff is kind of gross … It’s painful to [the sheep]

Noppinger is among 1,100 students, faculty and staff who have signed a petitioned circulated by campus group Coalition for Animal rights calling for an end to the course and the university’s sheep raising. The activists consider the tail docking and castration of the lambs to be mutilation. Coalition for Animal Rights chapter President Kaya Hansen told The Diamondback,

By mutilating and slaughtering lambs for a class, the university is clearly going against the moral judgment and simple common sense of students.

But the anecdote that really jumps out from the pages of the Post is a one-paragraph summary of a protest that took place at a California university,

Protesters at the University of California-Davis targeted the display of livestock at the agriculture college’s annual “Picnic Day,” some decrying the milking of cows as a form of rape, school officials recall.

Anyone who has anymore information about that protest, please e-mail me at [email protected]
Sources:

Castration of lambs sparks campus outcry. Katy Devlin, The Diamondback (University of Maryland), April 24, 2003.

Students protest livestock breeding. Amy Argetsinger, Washington Post, June 1, 2003.

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