Children's books and cows and things

There's a page in a children's book that bothers me. Well, several of them, really, but this one says: "This is a cow. Cows give us milk." Never mind that the picture on the page could be imaged to represent a cow only under the most Daliesque of paradigms, the notion that cows give us milk offends. In what reality could this be so? Do frogs give us legs? Do beavers give us pelts?

In the world I know, cows do not give, we take, and do some considerable violence to the animal in the taking. Sad cog in a huge factory, subjected to a forced mating in the middle of the previous lactation, a cow suffers the ripping away her offspring shortly after birth, a huge dose of antibiotics good for neither man nor beast, and a breeding program that in the fullness of time has produced creature that is a mere caricature of a competent animal. See this link for a radical view of the situation. There are lots of others, equally rabid, and a few with a more reasoned approach. It's not the point I'm working on just now.

What I'm thinking about is the view of the world we are presenting to our children, the pastel coloured one where the sun always shines, everyone is smiling, and happy cows give away the stuff that is meant to nourish their young. One might even imagine, as the Muppets did, legions of frogs on crutches, proud of their sacrifice to the betterment of mankind. Do kids not wonder why sometimes the world they see is a bit grey, that sometimes they don't feel much like smiling, that occasionally mother sounds cross, and some animals won't give up their treasures without a fight? Do they wonder what's wrong? Do they wonder about the dead frogs?

I feel there is some real danger in bringing up children who don't distinguish between teddy bears and grizzly bears, between giving and taking. Life is a struggle always, for all things, and I'm not sure we do our kids a service by pretending it's a picnic. You do not become deserving by being pure of heart. You are not owed. Contrary to what some would have us believe, the world was not put here for our benefit. We must work for our place in it, just like everything else.

I'm not about to suggest that we expose little children to the brutalities of the milk industry. I don't think we need to traumatize kids. All we need to do is be a little more honest. We get milk from cows. That's good enough to start with. We can talk about nature red in tooth and claw a little later.