This U.S. cow won supreme champion titles at World Dairy Expo in Wisconsin and at the Royal Winter Fair in Toronto. The cow was later stripped of its title in Wisconsin.
CHEATING IN THE RING? Holstein Canada to re-instate test to detect udder-plumping injections
Nelson Zandbergen
Farmers Forum
TORONTO — Holstein Canada says it will reinstate a ringside milk test at national-level cow shows to catch artificially plumped-up udders.
The move comes after the Royal Winter Fair’s current grand champion was retroactively stripped of the grand championship she won weeks earlier at World Dairy Expo in Madison, Wisconsin.
Organizers of World Dairy Expo won’t say what prompted their mid-December decision revoking the U.S.-based championship from the cow in question, Jeffrey-Way Hard Rock Twigs, two and a half months after her early October win in Madison. However, Holstein Canada — whose November show in Toronto was also won by Twigs — has reacted by bringing back a ringside milk test to stymie the prohibited practice of injecting a dextrose sugar solution up into a cow’s udder through the teats in order to improve her mammary appeal.
Holstein Canada’s interim on-farm operations manager and member of the organization’s ethics committee Pascal Lemire confirmed that reviving the test in Canada was in response to events south of the border. “Yes, exactly,” he said.
Milk testing will be back for the 2025 Royal and possibly two other Canadian national shows, Lemire said. Holstein Canada previously used the milk test but dropped it five or six years ago because of the cost involved, about $6,000 per show, and the fact that it “never found anything,” he said.
Lemire explained that Holstein Canada has been confident in its ability to otherwise catch udder adulterators and other ethical breaches — such as overwatering a cow (through tube insertion), illegally painting her hide or fixing her hooves with wood — through careful surveillance of the exhibitors and their animals in the cattle stables before a show and during an inspection before the animals enter the ring. For this reason, he’s also “very confident” in the legitimacy of Twigs’ 2024 grand championship at the Royal, which stands.
Injecting a cow’s teats with dextrose, using plastic needles, would be a 20- to 25-minute process and still “very, very easy to catch” with Holstein Canada’s barn surveillance program, he said.
Big American shows already employ the milk test, Lemire said. Milk is taken from the top two or three winners at a show and sent to a lab to check for the presence of dextrose. It’s one of only two scientific tests currently employed to catch dairy cattle-show cheating.
The other is an ultrasound test used to scan competing cows’ udders to check for air pumped up through the teats. Direct injection of dextrose into teats became a method of beating the ultrasound test, for exhibitors determined to give their animals’ udders the best esthetic appearance.
A knowledgeable breeder speaking on condition of anonymity said that injecting an udder with dextrose — which is used for other purposes in bovine medicine — would make an udder appear more balanced if one of the quarters were weaker, possibly as a result from mastitis damage. The dextrose solution is ultimately absorbed into the cow’s body.
Twigs was exclusively owned by a combination of three Americans when she competed in Madison last October. By the time she appeared in the Toronto ring a month later, her ownership group had expanded to include two Canadian breeders, Elgin County’s Walker Dairy of Aylmer and R&F Livestock of Saskatchewan.
Lisa Behnke, communications manager for World Dairy Expo, told Farmers Forum she had “no knowledge” of the reason Twigs was stripped of her American title and the Madison show’s reserve grand champion consequently listed as the new champion. “All I know is that the results posted on the website are accurate and per our ethics policy, there’s no further discussion.”
Behnke said the results are “finalized” after an ethics hearing process. “There’s a due process and that process has been completed in the official results that are posted.”
The process of stripping a title “takes months” to complete involves “face-to-face contact and the opportunity for everyone to discuss it,” she said. In the end, the parties involved “are not at liberty to speak about it.”
However, she confirmed that the removal of Twigs’ championship did not involve any allegation of corruption in the judging process.
Lemire said it would take about a week for the results of a milk test to be back in the hands of show organizers after collecting the sample.
