Tag Archives: Cow

Give these cows some dried prunes

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Cow patty bingo, an American Red Cross fundraiser, had to be rescheduled to August 16 after two cows failed to poop. The cows wandered the bingo grid behind the third-base bleachers for 2 1/2 hours, but didn’t leave any patties behind, said Suzanne Phillips, a spokeswoman for the American Red Cross in Burlington.

I was visiting a close friend about a week ago and he sent me to the store to get some “poop pills” – a bag of dried prunes. He eats about 4 or 5 each morning while reading the paper. 

His mother is another constipation victim of the family. She was telling me she cannot afford to skip her daily “poopy shake”– a mixture of 8 different types of fiber that she mixes with orange juice. She eats a ton of fruits and vegetables, and has a wide variety of natural laxatives in the medicine cabinet. This is the most impressive one here (in Spanish, sorry)


Maybe these cows could call my friend or his mom for some advice.

Read the story at: the times news

Do happy cows make happy milk?

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Are humans safer when they’re happy? Are you?
Ok. Now follow this logic…
Are cows?

I’m willing to go along with the California Cow commercial that claims “Great cheese comes from happy cows” and maybe even the only happy cows in the world come from California. Why not – the weather is nice and the people are laid-back. But does that necessarily mean their milk is safer?

In a post today on http://wewantorganicfood.com/
author, Lynn Cameron says, “If there could be a master key to safe raw milk, I think it would be contented cows.” The author contends that today, some raw milk is unsafe because some cows spend their days indoors, “living on field corn and soybeans to the degradation of their milk and the degeneration of the nation’s health.” I guess this is something akin to the cubicle complex.

Call me a skeptic, but I really need some science to back up this happy feeling. It’s nice to think that happy cows frolicking on the hill cannot produce anything bad. The author of the article rightfully makes a call to our nostalgia – to a happier time before farming was industrialized. Nostalgia is nice, but it does not make food safer. While Cameron says, “It’s not complicated science to understand that quality of life as well as diet affects cows’ milk quality,” her inability to produce that uncomplicated science leaves me completely unconvinced. This kind of thinking, that cows “raised entirely outdoors on green grass and/or hay, their milk is proven time and again greatly reduced in pathogens (bad bacteria),” has really not been proven as explained by David Renter in September 2006. “Cattle raised on diets of ‘grass, hay and other fibrous forage’ do contain E. coli O157:H7 bacteria in their feces as do other animals including deer, sheep, goats, bison, opossum, raccoons, birds, and many others.”

I’m completely in favor of good conditions and happy cows – who wouldn’t be? But even in the best conditions, microbiological contamination can happen – just as it happens in very happy homes with very content cooks. “Confinement cows” or “happy cows,” the only scientifically proven measure to reduce the risk of dangerous pathogens in milk is pasteurization.

Don’t eat cow poop

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But apparently that’s exactly what 11 boys and one staff member at the Mount Carmel Youth Ranch in Wyoming did earlier this year and got a whopping dose of campylobacter.

The Billings Gazette reported that Kelly Weidenbach, a Wyoming Department of Health epidemiologist, said that the outbreak was probably caused by residents unknowingly ingesting feces from a sick calf.

Weidenbach also said that stool samples from some residents and one calf from the ranch tested positive for the same strain of campylobacter, making it likely that a calf with a diarrheal illness was the source of the outbreak, and that tracking the source of the outbreak was "complicated by the fact that boys help prepare food for one another, and they were also working with cattle."

She said there was no evidence that the bacteria was food-borne, and water tests came back negative.

Don’t eat poop.

Wow, man, that would be awesome

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On Friday, researchers with the National Center for Scientific Research in France announced they had reported in the September 5th edition of the Journal of Neuroscience that the administration of the nonpsychoactive cannabinoid cannabidiol (CBD) inhibits prion accumulation in the brain and protects neurons against prion toxicity.

It only took until Monday for the Australian National Organisation for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (Norml) to adopt the paper as its own.

Norml spokesman Chris Fowlie said the discovery added to the scientific evidence supporting Australian Green MP Metiria Turei’s bill to legalise the medicinal use of cannabis, stating,

"[It] should be supported by any MP with a clear head. Unfortunately most politicians act like mad cows whenever cannabis is mentioned."