Agriculture

As I listened to Weekend Edition this Saturday, there seemed nothing on offer but bad, sad news. Most of it was fully anticipated: the war in Ukraine, the latest COVID surge, and the sorry state of American politics. But even the news of agriculture, which is the source of our sustenance and should be uplifting, was a downer: reports of an avian flu affecting domestic poultry, and an interview with Andrea Arnold, the director of a recently released documentary, Cow. The film, which chronicles the life of a cow in a commercial dairy farm over a four year period, has been described, in the New York Times review, as a "feel bad movie." The focus of the interview about Cow, however, was less on the dismal circumstances of the dairy cow's life, and more about our reaction to it.  Are we over-anthropomorphizing animals, the interviewer asked, when we assume their emotions are similar to our own? Exhibit A in this discussion was the moment when a calf is removed from its mother, in order to transition t