42. Inseparable from the animal welfare issues concealed by the CMAB ads is their environmental implications. The sprawling pastures and rolling hills suggest an environmental friendliness associated with the California dairy industry that, in reality, is far from accurate. California dairies are among the worst contributors to pollution. In fact, because of the severe pollution problem they are now facing, and amidst concerns voiced by its citizens and animal welfare and environmental groups, the state’s three largest dairy counties have been forced to make moves toward imposing strict environmental guidelines—a development that dairies have openly expressed displeasure with and which prompted the scrapping of plans, in one of the counties, to build the largest dairy in the state—45,000 cows on several farms. ("Got Milk? Got Problems Too." Los Angeles Times, August 20, 2000.)

43. The Times article further reports that in Tulare County, the heart of California’s dairy industry, lagoons of liquid manure from dairies can be "as big as four football fields laid end to end. The stench can be overwhelming and the flies thick on a hot day."

44. In the CMAB ads, the manure lagoons are replaced with beautiful pastures. It is an ideal setting that undoubtedly would satisfy cows and consumers alike. But for the majority of California’s dairy cows, it is a setting of fiction, and for the unsuspecting consumer, it is an injuriously misleading sales pitch.

45. A dairy cow will expel 120 pounds of fecal waste every day, as much as two dozen people (conservatively estimated). Multiply that times the 650 cows that are in the average California herd and the result is a daily waste output for each herd equivalent to that of 17,550 people. That means that California’s dairy cows expel more waste every day than the entire human population of the state!

46. One can certainly understand why the CMAB would not want to create a depiction in its ads of smelly cow lots and vast manure lagoons, but it cannot avoid this reality by deceptively misleading consumers into believing that the problem doesn’t exist, which is exactly what it has attempted to do.