A Lie Will Get Halfway Around The World...

Winston Churchill is supposed to have said that "a lie will get halfway around the world before the truth gets its shoes tied." Nowhere is this more true then on the Internet. A certain Libertarian of my acquaintance sent me to this link: Wisconsin Judge Rules No Right to Own a Cow or Drink Its Milk. He was in high dungeon over "tyranny."

Well, this didn't pass the smell test, so I used my critical thinking skills and Googled "Mark and Petra Zinniker" (the losers in the case) and found out that:

1) They were running a dairy farm, providing "owners" of cows raw milk from "their" cow. [It's not at all clear how much "ownership" the absentee owners really had, if any.]

2) In September, more than 30 people from Walworth, Waukesha and Racine counties were diagnosed with a bacterial infection from consuming raw milk traced to the [Zinniker] farm. The majority were children, and one was hospitalized.

3) The ruling actually said (PDF), that:
A) The cases cited by the Zinnikers didn't prove their point
B) The whole issue was irrelevant because the Zinnikers weren't in trouble over their cow, but over running a dairy farm (emphasis in original)
C) So the judge was not going to rule in their favor.

In short, the whole premise of the original post was wrong. Yet links to it are the entire first two pages of the Google search.