Hoping to allay such fears, farmer-funded Dairy Management Inc. partnered with an unlikely prankster, satire publication The Onion, to launch “The Udder Truth,” a pro-dairy video series that has trickled through as sponsored links at theonion.com. In one upbeat video, Annie Link of SwissLane Farms in Alto, Mich., says, with respect to farms run by big, unfeeling corporations, “All the farms around here are family-owned and -operated,” including her own. And she flatly denies animal mistreatment, which she says has a fiscal disincentive: “The more relaxed a cow is, the more comfortable they are, the more milk they’re going to give.”
Such is the modern equivalent of the “Got Milk?” campaign. “The dairy industry had to do something, as they are seeing more people walking away from mass-produced dairy products to alternatives,” says Joette Rockow, a senior lecturer on advertising and public relations at UW-Milwaukee. “The videos on The Udder Truth don’t really take into consideration other aspects such as the existential lives of these animals. … If I was a cow, I suspect I would want to be able to go outside, walk on some grass and be a cow.”
