ABSTRACT
Until recently, the fashion was to make the cow walk while the man stood still. But now the cow’s amble is too slow for modern needs and the latest idea is to place her on a turntable, so that she can be moved more expeditiously on-stage and off-stage again after milking. Far behind us are the days of the cowshed, where Buttercup and Daisy stood placidly in their stalls while human fingers squirted milk from their teats into buckets. The modern milking parlour has something of the atmosphere of a church, in the calm and decorum of what might be termed its ritual, for a thirteen hundredweight cow which is giving five gallons of milk a day must not be hurried or worried and a disturbed cow will not ‘let down’ her milk. The men stand in a pit, so that the cow’s teats are at eye-level; the cows file quietly into their milking stalls either side of the pit (or the turntable places them there) ; a small ration of palatable cow-cake (in effect a lollipop) is dropped from an overhead container into a receptacle in front of each nose; hanging above each man is a rubber brush which he pulls down and through which warm water containing a mild disinfectant flows on to the teats as he washes them; then he applies an electric milking cluster to each cow, 54and eight or twelve or more cows will yield their milk simultaneously to the pulsing of the milking machine.
