Why buy the cow?

By Johnny Fuery ⋅ August 18, 2006 ⋅  Print This Post ⋅ Post a comment

When I was 18, I heard a saying: “Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?”

What this young woman, an apparently devout follower of sex-is-a-weapon ideology, was urging another young woman to do was not sleep with her ex-boyfriend if she wanted him to get back together with her.

For some reason, that saying popped into my head shortly after awakening from an end-of-the-week nap this evening. And it got me thinking about appropriate responses.

The thing is, as a cow-purchaser, if I just wanted milk all the time, I’d buy a whole gaggle of cows. I mean, given a milk-first attitude, who wants to be subject to just one cow’s whims? What if the dang cow decides she’s gonna squirt sour milk one day for a whole month? Or suddenly dries up? Or serves up really rich milk, but only in small servings after being given shiny objects? And, while we’re musing, why stop with a typical mostly-white cow? How about a brown cow, a short cow, a tall cow, a black with white spots cow, a white with black spots cow, an albino cow, a skinny cow with big teets, a chubby cow with little teets, a cow with a shorter tail, a cow from Wisconsin, a cow from Cali…

But all of this is beside the point. Because, you see, you don’t buy cows for milk. You buy cows because you just, well, like the damn cow. You like waking up in the morning and seeing that cow hanging around — every morning, whether you’re thirsty for milk or not. You like the less tangible benefits of owning a cow, like how supportive they can be. You even like it when you’re looking for your cow out there in the field and you see what you think is another pretty cow, then, to your delightful surprise, you realize that you’ve been checking out your cow all along. Some cow-buyers, in fact, like it when the farmer next door admires their cow from afar, just because they know that they’re the only one that gets to sample the milk.

You see, one buys cows because they provide so much more than milk. The milk is really nice, and, truth be told, if the milk is sour or non-existent, it effects the perceived value of the whole cow, but the milk is pretty much peripheral when it comes to buying. And sampling the milk probably doesn’t matter a whole heck of a lot. In fact, it’s probably better to have a little sample before you buy. You’d hate to invest and then discover there were no milk!

(I wonder how dairy farms fit into this analogy? Is that Vegas?)