Our friends at Peta, with a plan to scare up some membership, have been scaring up the dumb with claims of pus in cow’s milk. In the first source below, milksucks.com/pus.asp, the claims come forth of “somatic cells” in milk indicating the presence of pus in America’s drinking milk supply. This is warranting a little research so off to work go I.
It at first appears to be a generally accepted consensus among anyone normally willing to discuss it, that milk does have a certain level of pus, and it’s being consumed, according to the types of discussions as found in source number two below YahooAnswers.
But some things are off by a mark, and some things are off by a mile. Doing a little more digging and going into some circles of other friends, who actually know what they’re talking about when subjects come up, the author found a few different sets of answers . . . as in a few of the answers in the third resource.
Does My Milk Have Pus? No! ‘Somatic‘ cells are not necessarily indicative of pus!
The very nature of milk being what it is, any analysis does show there are cells, chemicals, and nutrients of all sorts, that a calf would need to develop. There are even leukocytes and epithelial cells present in cow’s milk. It’s food for a developing baby animal. You’ll also find a similar composition of various chemicals in human mothers’ breastmilk, too. This doesn’t prove anything in the affirmative (nor in the negative) about the presence of pus in commercially-produced, professionally-farmed cow’s milk. Peta has nada.
Does My Milk Have Pus? It‘s illegal to put somatic celled blood in the tank anyway!
Before each cow is milked, each individual cow is inspected, and a ‘squirt test’ is performed. If any blood, pus, or anything ‘funny’ is indicated, the cow is milked and the batch is dumped. No part of any questionable batch is allowed into the storage tanks at any professionally run (yes…farming is a profession) commercial dairy farm.
Dairy farmers have too much tied up in their investment to ever risk allowing their livelihood to be pulled because of one bad batch of milk with pus in it. Peta calls the farmers dishonest.
Does My Milk Have Pus? Peta likes fear tactics.
Maybe Peta just needed some more individual members to send in some dues for another marketing effort to draw membership. And just maybe trying to use deceptive tactics of a blanket accusation of the entire dairy industry of an accusation of neglect and unprofessional conduct, should warrant an official apology from Peta to the dairy industry, and a retraction of their statement about pus being in our commercial milk supply.
A lot of good, hard-working people’s jobs are on the line because of false allegations of pus being present in America’s commercial milk supply. Might a class-action suit bring a group like Peta out onto the carpet over what they carelessly say in a marketing campaign?
It is the author’s humble opinion that Peta should be held accountable, in a civil proceeding, for claiming to know of the presence of pus in the American milk supply. Make Peta prove they can demonstrate the presence of pus in milk.
Sources:
http://www.milksucks.com/pus.asp
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20070302165124AAq4IQs
