Dairy cows in the Antarctic.
Perhaps you were expecting dinosaurs or mutated penguins but no, today we are talking about…..Dairy cows.
In 1934, three Guernsey cows – Deerfoot, Klondike and Southern Girl – were landed on the Antarctic continent as part of Byrd’s Second Antarctic expedition. As well, Klondike had given birth to a young bull on the trip, and he was named ‘iceberg’
Their role was to provide fresh milk for Byrd’s fifty-five men but their larger role was in their novelty value, which would attract media publicity and with it funding for the expedition.
They were off-loaded in Antarctica in February, 1934.
Southern Girl immediately tried to get back onto the ship. Who says cows are dumb? They were to spend three weeks in a tent until their barn was ready. Local temperatures were around -43C (-45F) so their body heat would melt a hole in the snow and they would have to be dragged out each morning. They all suffered frostbite.
Their barn was much more luxurious than the tent and had heavy insulation, a stove and a raised standing area. Unfortunately, Klondike never fully recovered from the earlier frostbite and she had to be put down.
When they returned to America after a year on the ice, Deerfoot, Southern Girl and Iceberg became celebrities. They met the Secretary of Agriculture, were guests at luncheons and made headlines in the New York Times. Deerfoot went on to meet the Governor of Massachusetts and was presented with the key to the city of Boston.
They were then taken on a tour of fairs and stock shows across the Eastern States of America and eventually returned to their respective farms retaining local fame for quite some time. There was even a children’s book written about their adventures – ‘Something to tell the Grandcows’.
It probably wasn’t necessary to take cows to the South Pole as powdered milk was a known quantity (patented in 1872) and held its nutritional content for four years, and Byrd had taken plenty of powdered milk and malted milk powder with him, as well as the cows.
But as an exercise in marketing it worked very well. Perhaps they were the first celebrity cows. Loosely based on this historical event, Eileen Spinelli’s humorous children’s book ‘Something to tell the Grandcows’ tells of Emmadine the cow’s adventures with Admiral Byrd.
