My parents have dairy cows, so the whole family drinks raw milk.  I wouldn't buy raw milk if I didn't know where it was coming from, because like any food, it can support harmful bacteria.  Just like I wouldn't eat other raw foods from anonymous sources without cooking or cleaning them properly. (See the e coli scares in spinach, tomatoes, etc.)  

But if you know the dairy, and you can see that their cows are healthy and they keep things clean, it's as safe as anything.  The most important thing is that the cows not be on a grain-heavy diet.  Cows are designed to eat grass and other fodder; when they eat a lot of grain, their stomachs produce thousands of times more e coli and other dangerous bacteria than they do when eating grass.  So if a speck of manure would make its way into the milk somehow (unlikely if the dairyman is careful, but it can happen), manure from a grain diet is thousands of times more likely to infect the milk.

Raw milk helps people with lactose intolerance because the lactase enzyme that helps you break down the lactose sugar is destroyed by pasteurization.  It also looks likely that when people have issues with casein (milk protein), that's often an aftereffect of gluten damage to the gut wall, so when people eliminate gluten, the casein issues go away too.

However, no raw milk advocate wants to make anyone drink raw milk.  If you want to drink pasteurized milk, you should be free to do so.  (You can even pasteurize it yourself just like you can buy raw meat and cook it -- simply heat the milk to 160 degrees before using it.  That kills less of the beneficial stuff than the high-heat ultra-pasteurization most of the processors use today.)  We just want to be allowed to drink raw milk and to buy and sell it without using Prohibition-era dodges like calling it 'pet food' or awkward methods like cow shares.

Exactly.

We are adults and free men. We don't need to be protected from ourselves!

They give adults a choice about things that destroy a person (and society) such as birth control and abortion -- but they're going to go ahead and decide FOR us on things like raw milk? Doubleyou-Tee-Eff?

If we want to drink raw milk, it is our right to do so! What kind of tyrant government has the audacity to step in and tell me what I can and cannot drink!

So something offensive to God and nature (like abortion) is left to our discretion, but something harmless like milk produced by an animal God created, in the way He designed it -- that is too evil for us to be able to choose?

Matthew

My old neighbor milked cows in the 30s.  He doesn't drink any milk to this day.

Washing the udders was difficult, and he said it was very hard to get them clean.  It was very hard to keep the milk from getting hit with manure.

The milk would be kept cool with well water, and sent into town on a wagon.

With milking machines it should be a lot different.

Really - if we had a sane society more people would keep animals for their personal use.  If one in five families had a couple cows it would produce enough milk for everyone.

Having had family in the dairy business (who always milked by hand), I dont remember them ever complaining about washing the udders... their problem was impatient cows who didnt want to hold still and most often kicked over the milk pail! lol.  

One thing about the milking machines. I dont know anyone who has had a problem with using the milking machines, but on the factory scale, there is a great risk of over-milking and bruising the tits of the udder, resulting in blood and pus leaking into the milk.