The cow is a common domestic animal. She eats only grass and parts of plants. Therefore the cow is a herbivorous animal. Furthermore, she belongs to the class of animals called “mammals”.

It is interesting to see how the calf sucks her udder bulging with milk.

The cow gives us milk. When her udder is gently and methodically squeezed, a jet of milk is emitted with a hissing sound. Although the cow is milked twice a day, our villagers are always generous enough to leave sufficient milk in reserve for the calf.


The cow-milk is very nutritious. It is said that, in nutritive value, it is second only to mother’s breast-milk. Therefore it is very appropriate to call the cow by the name “kiri amma”.

Curd, ghee, butter, cheese, all kinds of powdered milk etc., are all produced from cow’s milk. Therefore it is not an exaggeration to say that all the people living all over the world are indebted to the cow for their growth and strength.

There are poor villagers who rear one or two cows in their home-gardens. They do so in order to scrape a living by selling a few bottles of cow-milk daily. They treat those cows or their bread-winners very tenderly. They feed and bathe them on time and shelter them properly.

Yet, there are some heartless persons who sell their aged and worn out cows to the butcher for a few trained notes. It is extremely pitiful to see how such cows are being drawn along forcibly and mercilessly. Those cows with their faces darkened and shrunk and eyes welled in terms bellow in mirror in horror of death helplessly. They do so as they have smelt their ultimate fate. It is doubtless that those innocent animals curse the man most bitterly for his act of ingratitude and barbarism.

On the other hand there are also well-to-do people who keep large herds, of cows on their large-scale farms. Unlike the poor villagers, they rear those cows not only for milk, but also for beef and other by-products such as skins and horns obtained in their killing.

Whether such acts are committed by the poor or the rich, it is ungrateful and immoral to kill and eat the flesh of those who generously give their milk for our survival. Such acts are not only common, but also on the increase in the present, morally bankrupt society.

Yet, as stars glitter in stark dark nights, we even occasionally see some generous, noble and exemplary acts committed by some Individuals rich not in money, but in moral standards.

They pay exorbitant prices to the butchers and save the innocent cows from their brutal grips. Such noble life-offering acts are common on the great poya days such as Vesak and Poson.