Cat Willett for Vox
Marina Bolotnikova is a deputy editor for Vox’s Future Perfect section. Before joining Vox, she reported on factory farming for national outlets including the Guardian, the Intercept, and elsewhere.
This story was originally published in The Highlight, Vox’s member-exclusive magazine. To get early access to member-exclusive stories every month, join the Vox Membership program today.
At Vox, I specialize in writing and editing all sorts of stories about animal agriculture and the future of food, from the strange ritual of eating turkeys on Thanksgiving to the policy debates around the fate of mother pigs in the pork industry. But the lives of America’s 9.4 million dairy cows have always been especially close to my heart, and to many people who care about farm animals, for reasons that will become clear as you read this comic. I’d written a bit about dairy cows before, but to truly do the story justice, I knew I needed to narrate and illustrate, in depth, a dairy cow’s life from birth to death (and even then, there was so much from my research that had to be left on the cutting-room floor). Once you really see it, it’s impossible to look at milk the same way again.
Sources and further reading:
• Regrouping induces anhedonia-like responses in dairy heifers (JDS Communications, a journal of the American Dairy Science Association)
