By Amanda Minervini
For many years I have traveled throughout Italy with my American students, and for some time we sojourned in Campania. Without giving my students too much background information, I took them to visit some of the famous estates where the Water Buffaloes (Bubalus bubalis) are supposedly “massaged and happy,” and where, as a result, the mozzarella and the meat are said to be “even more delicious” and “heavenly.” Over the years, the wide range of reactions shown by the students struck me, from horror at the animals’ conditions to complete indifference, underscored by their immediate requests to taste the ice cream made from buffalo milk. What I am writing here is not the result of some secretive investigative inquiry, but simply what any tourist can see at any one of these estates. If they want to see.
Every time I hear talk of “happy buffalo”—the ones that, in promotional videos and articles, listen to music, scratch themselves on rotating brushes, and live a bucolic life on lush green meadows—I feel a deep anger. For years we have been accustomed to a pastoral imaginary, as if buffalo mozzarella were the natural result of a harmony between human beings, territory, and animal. But it only takes a little digging—and the reading of some scientific studies, not activist investigations—to discover that the truth is very different. In fact, a quick tourist visit to one of the famous “happy” masserie, perhaps after a visit to the beautiful Paestum, is enough to realize that it is… quite simply a hoax. In all my visits I have never heard a single musical note, and the brushes meant to relieve the poor buffaloes’ itching were always malfunctioning. The poor buffaloes looked quite shut down or clearly unhappy.
The buffalo is an animal whose psychophysical well-being depends on access to water and humid environments (Napolitano et al.,
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