Fw: Cow Boob job

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----- Original Message ----- From: Kathi

Jim

Sent: Wednesday, October 09, 2002 9:41 PM

Subject: Cow Boob job

thanks so much Kathy! Source : Milwaukee Journal Sentinel , 10/07/2002 Author(s) : Marilynn Marchione AN : 2W71096262430 Database: Newspaper Source * * * Dairy-cow enhancements are udderly deceitful MILWAUKEE-Dairy show judges wonder the same thing oglers do when they see a well-endowed female: Are those real? Cows are being given bovine "boob jobs"-injections to help the little miss look her best in the show ring and cheat her way to a lucrative trophy. It's against the rules, but unlike "falsies" in a teen's bra, "foamies" in a cow's udder couldn't be detected. Until now. University of Wisconsin-Madison veterinarians have developed a way to use ultrasound to reveal these chemical Wonderbras and used it last week in Madison at the World Dairy Expo, the world's biggest dairy competition. "We think we could clean up the Miss America contest with the same technology," said UW veterinarian O'Brien. Dairy farmers such as Elmo Wendorf of Oconomowoc, Wis., welcome it and want cheaters to be caught. "What they're trying to do is make both rear quarters absolutely equal, both 36 double-D," Wendorf said. "It's kind of like women having a breast implant. People really hate it when I compare cows to humans, but it's kind of the same." With a cow, size matters more for money than beauty because it reflects how much milk she'll produce and the price she and her offspring can command. "When I explain it to city friends, I say these are like Miss America pageants," Wendorf said. "The udder is 40 percent of the 100 points because that's where your livelihood comes from. You're not going to get 80 pounds a day out of a cow that has a peanut udder, as we call it. She's not going to be able to give it." First, an anatomy lesson. Cows have one udder with four quarters-front and rear, left and right. Each quarter has a teat, or nipple. (Cows also have four stomachs, but that's another matter.) Anyway, about those udders. What you want in a show cow is firm, large quarters of uniform size, shape and texture, like a car with matching tires that are perfectly aligned. It also helps if they're smooth rather than wrinkled where they hang from the cow, a place called the attachment. --- But Mother Nature rarely bestows such uniformity, so cow fitters-people who prepare the animals for show-have a bag of tricks for correcting imperfections. One is injecting saline or glucose solutions that draw water into the udder and swell it. That's easily detected by testing milk, which is routinely done on champions at contests such as World Dairy Expo. But show officials have been at a loss to detect other ways of cheating, such as the isobutane gas foamies they suspected some fitters were injecting. After seeing an article that O'Brien and UW veterinary surgeon Trostle published in February 1998 on using ultrasound to diagnose diseases of the udder, Expo officials contacted them and said, "Look, we've got this problem," O'Brien said. Foamies last about three days and are visible on ultrasound as small bubbles in the upper part of the udder, because gas rises. It's easy to distinguish from milk, which appears black on the screen, and normal glandular tissue, which looks white. The UW veterinarians tried ultrasound at one dairy show and discovered that the grand champion's udder had been chemically enhanced. They tried it at World Dairy Expo in 1998 and found nearly half of the cows had been tampered with. "The word went out that we could see it," and the incidence fell off dramatically over the next few years to the point where not a single cow was caught with foamies last year, O'Brien said. But something else replaced them-injections of a liquid silver protein into areas where udders attach to make them look smooth and less wrinkled, a treatment similar in visual effect to a Botox shot. In hopes of cleaning up the industry, however, a cow fitter has been teaching UW veterinarians how it's done. "He saw it trickling down to the junior shows" and wanted to make the competition fairer, O'Brien said. Without him, the veterinarians would have been lost, he admits. "We knew they were injecting them, but we had no idea where" or when or what was being used, he said. O'Brien's first attempt to catch this, at last year's Expo, found "a distressingly large" percentage of cows had been injected, so many that it took him two days to pre-sent cases against all the people he was accusing of cheating to the Expo board. --- Besides the fairness of the competition, there are potential human health and economic concerns. There isn't a known safe level for silver in milk, and it's unknown whether injecting it into udder attachments could contaminate milk or for how long, O'Brien said. "If people heard something was in the milk, they'll stop drinking milk. It's devastating to the whole industry," said Wendorf, the Oconomowoc farmer, who is on the boards of World Dairy Expo and of Holstein Association USA, the largest dairy breeding association in the nation. "The reason we're doing this is to prevent anything going into the food chain. If we don't police ourselves, who's going to?" Tom McKittrick, general manager of World Dairy Expo Inc., said ultrasound has been invaluable at catching cheaters and ensuring a clean show. "The science Dr. O'Brien has done is excellent. It's very effective, and it's very accurate," he said. One limitation is that ultrasounds are done after the grand and reserve champions have been picked, because touching a cow's udder with the ultrasound transducer during or before judging could trigger milk letdown and unfairly reduce udder size. The top third of each age group and class is imaged-about 200 cows-after the judging is over. If a winner is found to have been tampered with, the owner is barred from showing at the Expo for one, two or three years, Wendorf said. --- McKittrick would not say what discipline had been taken or against how many. More than punishment, ultrasound's greatest value may be in preventing abuse, he said. "It's a little bit like putting a policeman on the highway. The idea isn't so much to catch speeders but to slow things down," because cheaters can see they'll be caught, McKittrick said. Other states have hired O'Brien to teach at seminars and train dairy judges to spot signs of udder tampering. They worry about what cheaters will try next and about being able to stay one step ahead of, or at least one step behind, them. "There's always somebody out there trying to find the next thing. That's true in sports or whatever," Wendorf lamented. The actual prize for first place is less than $200 for many of these contests, but breeding rights and embryo sales are extremely valuable, he said. Dairy experts said the difference is in thousands, not millions, of dollars. "It makes a whale of a difference" to be first, Wendorf said. "Nobody remembers who's second. But they all want to have an offspring out of who won." --- © 2002, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Visit JSOnline, the Journal Sentinel's World Wide Web site, at http://www.jsonline.com/ Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services. -----