Those cow sanctuaries got us to thinking

It was news to us that there is a cow sanctuary in West Virginia, actually, a couple of them. But it shouldn’t be too surprising. Cows are sacred to Hindus, and both New Vrindaban village operated by Hare Kishnas and the International Society for Cow Protection located nearby are run by Hindu groups.

We learned of these cow sanctuaries through an article in the Wall Street Journal. Focus of the article was that the people running the cow sanctuaries were having trouble raising enough money to feed and care for the cows. They had started an adoption program of sorts, whereby people could adopt and support a cow in one of the sanctuaries as long as it lived. A main objective of the sanctuaries is to keep cows from being slaughtered.

A couple of thoughts came to mind. One, it is good that people appreciate the economics of caring for farm animals. Neither money nor feed grows on trees, and the sanctuaries are learning that it costs a lot of money to own cattle, regardless of the purpose. Their cows probably don’t eat very much though. Only about six of the 80 cows at New Vrindaban produce milk, with the rest just waiting out their time.

Which brings us to our second thought. Wouldn’t it be better to slaughter cows humanely at the proper time rather than let them die of old age? Actually, we’ve thought about this before. We keep cows to produce nutritious milk, and, when the time comes, we see that they are harvested for their nutritious meat. Thanks to animal behavior specialists such as Temple Grandin and others, care and handling at slaughter has improved greatly. To our way of thinking, that beats the alternative.