Save the Cows

Save the Cows!

Daylight savings starts again this week which means that the talkback radio stations will be clogged with people complaining that it will fade their curtains make their external paint discolour or even worse start to crack and peel and farmers will argue that cows stop producing milk.

If you subscribe to these arguments then I suggest that you stop reading now as you are sure to find the rest of this article too complex as I will use multisyllabic (long) words.

Daylight savings is a misleading title, as we are not adding more daylight hours, there is still 24 hours in every day. Daylight savings is simply a renaming of the hours. When Alecia Moore became the artist we know as Pink she did not create an Alecia-saving, she merely changed her name. Daylight saving is that simple.

For 5-6 months per year many countries and states rename the hours of the day. It is not a complex code. 9am becomes 10am, 10am becomes 11am, 11am becomes (this one is tricky) 12 pm or 12 noon, and so on.

Yes it is correct to say that the number of daylight hours during each day does increase during the summer months, however this has nothing to do with what each of the individual hours is actually called.

Climate-change zealots may argue that daylight savings is at least partly to blame for global warming. The same time that we change the clocks, the days get longer, and the temperature starts to rise, therefore the changing of the clocks must be to blame.

This logic defies logic. It ignores the most basic of science that due to the rotation of the earth on its axis and the position of the planet in relation to the sun during its annual orbit.

Please indulge me as I address the issue of the bovine mammary drought supposedly brought on by the adjusting of the clocks. I am not a dairy farmer but I do know that they can not tell time. I do not want to describe a herd of cattle as simple but there understanding of time breaks down to sunrise means wake up, be milked, and then alternate between eating and defecating until sun set at which point they enjoy a repeat of the milking process before sleeping through to the next sunrise.

This is an animal that will readily line up behind its fellow beasts at the abattoir to be slaughtered. Walking through the doors only to have its neck cut and its guts dumped into a sluice before it can even utter moo to a goose.

This is not an animal that is likely to look at a watch and turn to its mate “hey Daisy, what are we doing being milked now, it is 6am?”

“6am Betsy, it feels more lie 5am”

“That’s it, I refuse to to produce any more milk until this is sorted out. I am calling the union!”

It is not a saving of daylight hours. No-one is stock piling daylight, saving them up for a rainy day. Though it might be useful to have a spare hour or two. We have all had times at work when we wished there was an extra hour or two in the day to get some tasks complete.

I would like to see a system similar to that for solar power in homes, where power generated that is surplus to need can be sold back to the grid. I would hope that my extra hours could be given to someone with a terminal disease. The organisers of the Delhi Commonwealth Games would have loved an extra hour or two. With a population of over 1 billion people. If every Indian citizen donated just one hour each, the organisers would have obtained an extra 125 years to build and rebuild the foot bridges and stadium rooves.

Queensland living up to its reputation for being a relaxed and laid back people do not enter into daylight savings. Their children do not have any trouble getting to sleep, their wallpaper is maintaining its colour, their timber decking is not cracking and most importantly their cows continue to produce milk.