It's a cow of a life

Want to know what it’s like to be a dairy cow, with an udder distended by up to 20 litres of milk? “Stick a football between your thighs,” John Webster suggests. Webster, professor of animal husbandry at the University of Bristol’s veterinary school, has written an even-handed but hard-hitting critique of modern livestock farming in Animal Welfare: A Cool Eye Towards Eden (Blackwell Science, £17.99, ISBN 0 632 03928 0). He wants to understand what it is that animals want and how they perceive their own quality of life. But he is not a farmer basher: he aims to “improve the quality of life for all sentient animals on the farm, and that includes the farmer and his or her family”.