[SpamCop-Social] Boob jobs for cows.

[Redstone]

Just when you think it couldn't get any wierder. :-)

---
Dairy cows get illegal 'boob jobs' for contests
Marilynn Marchione
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
Oct. 7, 2002 10:52 AM

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 Robert 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 Steven 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."

--------------------