The Cow Ordinance and the Health of Kennewick
A local resident protests the financial burden of new dairy regulations while grappling with the real threat of bovine tuberculosis.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
A few years ago the whole country was startled when a great corporation was fined twenty-nine million dollars for the infractions of a certain law. But that was a very puny fine compared to the thirty-six thousand five hundred dollar annual fine which is on the heads of lots of us five- and ten-acre fellows—makes no difference if we are only milking one little old measley brindle cow and selling her dairy products in Kennewick we are subject to a fine of one hundred dollars per day. Without cussing or discussing that cow ordinance I will refer to a time quite recent when we all could have had our cows tested free of charge and in addition, if there was a reactor in the herd the state would bear part of the loss. Every mother’s son of us knows that it is not fair to endanger the health of the public in selling them something that we are not exactly sure about. While the chances of contamination from brute to human may be almost negligible, I know from personal sorrows that touch deeply both in early and later years that we can not afford to take even the one chance, for we have only to lift our eyes to behold the black shroud of death that encircles the globe—the scourge of mankind: tuberculosis.
“Every mother’s son of us knows that it is not fair to endanger the health of the public in selling them something that we are not exactly sure about.”
This letter highlights a century-old tension in Kennewick between the economic survival of small-scale farmers and the imposition of public health regulations. Today, those same tensions echo in debates over zoning, agricultural land use, and the struggle to maintain local food production in the face of rapid urbanization.
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