Tippi
Rescue Date
23rd October 2006
Story
People often ask “Why don’t you drink milk?” quickly adding “It’s not as if the cow is killed to get it”. While we have often struggled for a polite answer from now on our answer will be ‘Tippi”. Tippi was only a few days old when we first saw this forlorn and lost looking little Murray Grey/Friesian cross calf in a pen at a calf sale one beautiful sunny day in October 2006. She was one of many calves offered for sale that day. But unlike like them Tippi is still alive, in fact by the time Tippi made it to her new home her pen mates would have been well on their way to the slaughterhouse if not dead.
To keep a cow producing milk she must be continually impregnated. The resulting offspring is surplus stock and is either sold as a veal/bobby (meaning hand reared) calf or if female she may be allowed to mature to follow the destiny of her mother. The milk that nature intended for the tiny 20-40kg bovine baby is taken from the mother cow, she will greatly miss her calf and has been known to frantically bellow fordays for her baby that she will never see again. We are constantly told that milk is natural and indeed it is, for a baby calf that is. Cow’s milk is designed for a creature that has four healthy stomachs not one like ours. It contains about three times as much protein as human milk with almost 50% more fat and is supremely designed for rapidly growing young calves to double their birth weight in just over a month.
What hit in the gut like a rush hour train was the sight of two sweet and innocent little black and white Friesian calves that were seen skipping and gamboling down the path way that was to take them to the slaughterhouse. These hapless two were, without their knowledge enjoying their last taste of sunshine, happiness and life. They are now dead. We have saved but one calf out of one million that are sold and slaughtered throughout the country each year in order for Australians to have their daily glass of mammary secretions of another species, otherwise know as milk.
Tippi will long serve as a reminder to us here at Edgar’s Mission of why we don’t drink cow’s milk. Her little white tip on her tail that gave her her name can now swing in the breeze with pure abandon as she now knows the kindness of human touch and the love of our species that has been denied her kind. May she long inspire others to question their need for milk and veal. Hail Tippi!
