PORT ROYAL, Pennsylvania (RNS) — On a quiet Sunday on rural Pennsylvania farmland, Dhruva and his favorite cow, Tabby, meet at dawn. While one recites a mantra to Lord Krishna using prayer beads, the other listens to religious chants as she’s milked. But they’re joined together at breakfast — both enjoying a sattvic, or spiritually pure vegetarian meal of organic produce sanctified by God before consumption.
Cows on the Gita Valley dairy farm outnumber humans by about 5 to 1, but the 20 full-time human residents prefer it that way.
“They’re like big dogs that like to run up to you and try to eat your hands or something,” said the commune’s head chef, Madhupan. Parijata, Dhruva’s wife, called the cows “friends, but also living entities that make a contribution and deserve our respect.” (As initiated members of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness, or ISKCON, the residents of the farm, besides eschewing illicit sex, intoxication, meat-eating and gambling, use only one name.)
Of Tabby, the “mascot of the herd” that has been producing milk for the longest among the cows, Dhruva simpl …