GENTLEMEN, THE COW!

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 59, Issue 4187, 18 September 1939, Page 4

GENTLEMEN, THE COW!

WHAT MANKIND OWES TO HER. Of all the animal friends of man, she is the greatest. To her we owe the most. I wish that I, as you are about to sit down to the noon-day meal, might remove from the table what the cow has placed thereon. I’d take the cup of milk waiting at the baby’s chair, I’d take the cream, the cheese, the butter, the custard pie, the cream biscuit, the steak, the smoking roast of beef, and leave you to make a meal of potatoes, beets, pickles, and tooth-picks. There is not a thing from nose to tail but that is utilised for the use of man. W,e use her horns to comb our hair, her skin upon our feet; her hair keeps the plaster on our walls, her hoofs make glue, her tail makes soup; she gives us our milk and cream, our cheese and butter, and her flesh is the greatest meat of the nation; her blood is used to make our sugar white, her bones are ground to fertilise her soil, and even her paunch she herself has put through the first chemical process necessary for the production of the best white cardboard, and it has been discovered that such paper can be made into the ■ finest quality of false teeth.

No other animal works for man both night and day. By day she gathers food, and when we are asleep at night she brings it back to rechew and convert it into all the things of which I speak. It was her sons that turned the first sod in the settler’s clearing; it was her sons that drew the prairie schooner for the sturdy pioneer, as inch by inch he fought his way to prove that “.Westward the star of Empire takes its sway,” with the old cow grazing behind; and when the day’s march was done she came and gave the milk to fill the mother’s breast to feed the suckling babe that was perchance to become the ruler of this country. Who says that much of what we are we do not owe to man’s best friend, the cow ? Treat her kindly, gently, for without her words fail to describe the siutation. .Mr H. J. Lancaster, the noted Jersey cattle judge, of Manawatu, quoted the foregoing in his demonstration adress at Kihikihi last Thursday, under the auspices of Te Awamutu Jersey Cattle Club, and he continued:.—

Now do you realise that you can clothe yourself with milk wool, buttoned with buttons made from milk (casein); shave yourself with a milk soap; and polish your shoes with a milk product, or whole -milk ? You can also write a cheque for your wife with a pen made from casein. The list of articles made in the modern world is absolutely astounding. If civilised people were to lapse into worship of animals the cow would certainly be their chief goddess. What a fountain of blessings is the cow—mother of beef, the source of milk and butter, the original of cheese, to say nothing of shoe horns, hair combs, and leather for all purposes. A gentle, ever-yielding animal that has no joy in her“S>wn fam-y ily affairs that she does not share with man. We rob her of her children so that we may rob her of her milk, and we care for her only when the robbing may go on year after year.