DairyDiary

cash cow?

Saturday, July 24th, 2010

An excerpt from the article In the current issue of Cyberspychology titled ‘The Construction of the Virtual Self on Myspace’ by Slimkhan, Manago, and Greenfield reads:

“As youth present themselves in these media enriched environments alongside commercial products, brands, and celebrity omnipresent on the Internet, they may be increasingly constructing aspects of their identities as images or brands, thereby erasing the line between commerce and the self.”

From my own experience of raising animals for slaughter I know that animal husbandry blurs the line between friendship and commodity.  As a child I learned to come to terms with the fact that my friends/pets were also food. I used to name our sheep after all my closest friends and elementary school classmates, and then as we would sit down to a lamb chop dinner in the dark of winter we would wonder who we were eating that night. Social profiling’s integration with commerce parallels the farming industry. When you look at Gloria for instance you see a personality with unique traits but in the end her worth is economic. http://www.facebook.com/home.php?

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The article quoted above …

Bovine Blog

Wednesday, July 21st, 2010

I’ve started making the acquaintance of a herd of heifers on a farm I will call ‘VT Farm’. The ladies are a dynamic bunch and we are just starting to get to know each other. This interest  in profiling the individual personalities of heifers was partially inspired by the article ‘Exploring Stock Managers — Perceptions of the Human-Animal Relationship on Dairy Farms and an Association with Milk Production’ by Catherine Bertenshaw and Peter Rowlinson at the School of Agriculture and Rural Development, Newcastle University, UK which states; “On farms where cows were called by name, milk yield was 258 liters higher than on farms where this was not the case (p < 0.001).” If interested, the full article can be downloaded from: http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/berg/anthroz/2009/00000022/00000001/art00006. Individual attention and interpersonal relationships are known to be paramount to human development and well being, but their being recently proven as beneficial to the bovine species raises interest in other comparative behavioral studies. As human relationships have expanded and been augmented via the internet and social networking sites, cyberpsychology has emerged. Can these investigations be applied to cows? How might cows react to virtual attention? Does the behavioral psychology of social networking have something to teach …

DairyDiary begins to log the adventures of Emily Nortons investigations into the dairy industry and …

Monday, July 12th, 2010

it actual and potential transformation to more … environmental health improving and biodiversity augmenting strategies

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