OXNARD : Pupils Drink In a Lesson on Cows and Milk

Five-year-old Joshua Ledford slowly patted the back of the week-old calf that stood under a tree at Oxnard’s Bernice Curren elementary school.

“It’s like a teddy bear,” he whispered to his friend, a 5-year-old girl who didn’t seem to be able to take her eyes off the calf.

Like most of the 70 children admiring the animal Friday morning, neither Joshua nor his friend had ever seen or touched a calf before.

“It’s a real treat for the kids,” said kindergarten teacher Ann Gramlich. “They will talk about this for the rest of the year.”

The unnamed calf and his traveling companion, a 6-year-old cow named Poly Jesse Rapture, were brought to the school by a parent, Greg Hanger, who is a student at Cal Poly’s school of agriculture.

“I think it’s important that kids know where milk comes from and that they learn how to be kind to animals,” said Hanger, who drove the animals to Oxnard in his pickup truck from the San Luis Obispo school.

After a three-hour drive, Hanger set out a makeshift stable and put the animals inside it. Then he showed the children how to milk the cow.

“You can’t be noisy because you will scare the cow and the calf,” he told the kids surrounding the fence. “The cow will not give any milk if it is scared.”

During the 20-minute talk, Hanger explained to the youngsters that at Cal Poly’s dairy, he uses a machine to milk the cow, but in the absence of the device, he was going to use his hands.

The tiny faces watched mesmerized as Hanger squeezed Poly’s milk into a metal bucket.

The silence was broken when Poly kicked the bucket over and the kids burst into laughter.

As Hanger explained the cow’s daily routine, dozens of little hands reached out between gaps in the fence to touch the calf, which had been moaning the whole morning.

“I can’t see, I can’t see!” yelled an exasperated Miguel Gomez, 4, as he tried to make his way into the crowd. “I need to see it, I need to see it.”