| Parents, you might not want to let small children view the following graphic image:
Are you terrified? You should be! Because these seemingly adorable little goats.... produce RAW MILK!
The City of San Diego is now undergoing a massive revamping of its urban ag laws. Today the city council reviewed the proposed new laws covering farmers markets, chickens, bees, and goats. Only the goats might not happen after all. They are, um, dangerous.
This morning, a letter came out from the county explaining that goats produce raw milk and therefore should not be allowed. It encouraged people to instead purchase their milk, either raw or pasteurized, from legal dairies. We have exactly two dairies left in our county and neither sell to the public. Legal raw milk options are also limited and - I would contend - unacceptable.
A huge crowd of citizens came to the meeting in support of the new laws and requesting tweaks to the proposed language of the laws here and there. One woman who spoke in favor of goats at the meeting gave the council a quick lesson in pasteurization. She brought a timer, a thermometer, and a pot and explained how one should bring the milk the required temperature for 30 minutes and then plunge it into an ice bath to cool it rapidly. The council members laughed, since it is obviously very simple for people to pasteurize their own milk if they wish to.
I focused my remarks on ducks, which were left out of the proposed law, but sent in written comments that read, in part:
I'm quite upset about the notion that goats should be outlawed because they might produce raw milk. Please consider that people are permitted to buy raw meat under the expectation that they will cook it. What's more, under U.S. law, it's legal for up to 49.9% of ground turkey samples tested to test positive for salmonella. This is disturbing as ground meat can have pathogens in the center and not just on the surfaces of the meat, which means consumers can become ill unless they cook the meat extremely thoroughly. When Consumers Union tested a random sampling of fresh supermarket broilers (chicken) in 22 states, 66 percent were found contaminated with either campylobacter, salmonella, or both. Most of the pathogens detected were resistant to at least one antibiotic. And consumers are trusted to cook this tainted meat sufficiently to avoid illness and allowed to risk it if they want to cook their turkey burgers rare instead of well done. Why are we not trusted to produce and/or pasteurize our own milk?
What's more, the most dangerous food statistically is not raw milk but raw oysters - and those remain legal.
I find it unreasonable enough that U.S. citizens in much of the country cannot legally buy raw milk, but banning people from owning a goat simply because you do not want them to drink raw milk from their own goat is one step too far. Even in states with very strict laws against the sale of raw milk, farmers and their families can drink milk from their own animals without pasteurizing it. |
