CONCORD, N.H. (AP) — So much for sharing the good news about a newborn calf named Pitcher Diego. 
 
 A New Hampshire farm that posted a video of the Scottish Highland calf is coming under fire from animal rights supporters who don't want the animal to be slaughtered. 
 
 The video, posted on Facebook, has gotten nearly 13 million views and sparked a heated debate about eating meat. Many of the comments against the video are from people angry because they think the calf will be slaughtered or had been ripped away from its mother. 
 
 The Concord Monitor reports Yankee Farmer's Market in Warner posted the video of Pitcher Diego, who was born during a snowstorm. In it, the calf — tied up with a red rope — stares into the cameras as he is warmed by an off-screen hair dryer. He appears to quietly moo during the 21-second video. 
 
 Some people are trying to drive down the farm's reviews using Facebook's rating system. Several also have offered to adopt the calf. 
 
 "I'm not sure how you get that much negativity out of a picture of a baby cow," said Farm owner Brian Farmer, who has 30 head of Scottish Highland cattle and 60 head of American buffalo. 
 
 Farmer said he was taken aback by the negative reaction, given his animals roam and graze freely in pastures and are raised without antibiotics or hormones. He says the calf has been returned to its mother, and its thick neck, strong body and gentle disposition make it a good candidate for breeding — rather than a trip to the butcher. 
 
 Farmer said Pitcher Diego will be registered as a breeding animal as part of the farm's effort rebuild its herd of Scottish Highland cattle that have been raised on his other farm, Pitcher Mountain Farm in Stoddard, for five decades. The herd had dwindled from 80 to 12 but has since rebounded to 30 after Farmer took over the farm in 2013. The cattle spend the bulk of their time at three locations on 300 acres. 
 
 "We are trying to do it the right way and not mass producing animals. We are trying to give them the best life possible," Farmer said. "When you raise them that way, they are healthy and happy. When you consume that product, it's a healthy product." ||||| Newborn calf Diego curls up outside on a sunny day at Yankee Farmer’s Market in Warner. Diego caused quite a stir when a video taken shortly after he was born went viral. Caitlin Andrews / Monitor staff 
 
 Diego (left) and his mother Elvira hang out on a sunny day at Yankee Farmer’s Market in Warner. Diego caused quite a stir last week when a video taken shortly after he was born went viral, attracting both positive and negative attention to the farm. Caitlin Andrews—Monitor staff 
 
 Diego (left) and his mother Elvira hang out on a sunny day at Yankee Farmer’s Market in Warner. Diego caused quite a stir last week when a video taken shortly after he was born went viral, attracting both positive and negative attention to the farm. Caitlin Andrews—Monitor staff 
 
 Diego (left) and his mother Elvira hang out on a sunny day at Yankee Farmer’s Market in Warner. Diego caused quite a stir last week when a video taken shortly after he was born went viral, attracting both positive and negative attention to the farm. Caitlin Andrews—Monitor staff 
 
 Diego (left) and his mother, Elvira, hang out on a sunny day at Yankee Farmer’s Market in Warner. Diego caused quite a stir last week when a video taken shortly after he was born went viral, attracting both positive and negative attention to the farm. Caitlin Andrews / Monitor staff 
 
 Monitor staff 
 
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 Yankee Farmer’s Market owner Brian Farmer and his wife wanted to share something cute when they posted a video to their Facebook page last week showing a Scottish Highland calf that was born in a snowstorm. 
 
 Who wouldn’t, they figured, love to see a video of a fluffy newborn animal getting warmed up with a blow dryer? 
 
 Turns out a fair amount of people didn’t love it. 
 
 The video has garnered 12 million views and more than 138,000 shares since Thursday. Some of the global attention has been positive. Farmer named the newborn Diego, after a Spanish family asked if the calf could be named for their 7-year-old son. 
 
 But the video also attracted a fair amount of negative attention from animal rights supporters. 
 
 “Why are you posting videos of cute baby animals when you’re going to kill them and sell them as food?? There’s something really twisted about that,” wrote Lauren-Klair, from the United Kingdom. Several others, from Hawaii to New Orleans, have offered to adopt the calf to save it from its fate. 
 
 Protestors have not only shared their displeasure at seeing a baby animal they believe will soon be slaughtered, but have used Facebook’s starring system to drive down the farm’s reviews. The page has 174 “five-star” ratings and 191 “one-star” ratings as of Tuesday, with only a handful of three- and four-star ratings in between. 
 
 It’s a frustrating situation for Farmer, who said he feels he is doing everything he can to give his animals the best life possible and is raising them ethically. His herds, which include buffalo along with the Scottish Highlanders, mostly roam and eat freely in pastures and are raised without antibiotics or hormones. He said several people assumed Diego was taken away from his mother permanently, or was slated to become veal. Both are untrue, he said: Yankee Farmer’s doesn’t produce veal, and Diego, who was born outside in chilly weather, was returned to his mother shortly after he was dried off. Farmer doesn’t slaughter his animals on site, either, as that requires a license from the USDA. 
 
 “I’m not sure how you get that much negativity out of a picture of a baby cow,” he said. 
 
 Farmer was also concerned with how the protesters are using the review system as a platform for their beliefs about whether animals should be eaten at all, a question he feels goes beyond what his farm stands for and the animal-raising practices they use. 
 
 “A large amount of our customer base are basically vegetarians in the sense that they don’t agree with what the food industry does with animals,” he said. “They’re really interested in addressing the health and humanity of it all.” 
 
 But Farmer said he has been “humbled” by the support he has seen from his customers and the community at large, who have also taken to Facebook to defend the farm. 
 
 “If you’ve ever been there, you know that you can walk right up to the open pastures they keep their animals in, free to roam and graze as they please – no factory farm conditions here. A place deserving praise, not the wholly-undeserved and uneducated insults and hatred being thrown their way from people thousands of miles away who have never set foot there,” Aaron from Warner wrote. 
 
 Love it or hate it, Farmer said they’ll continue to post about their animals in an effort to educate the public on how they live. 
 
 “Not all food is created equal,” he said. “I can haphazardly grow a tomato in my backyard and it will still be better than anything you can buy in a store. And a lot of these people think they’re acting conscientiously, but many growing practices end up harming the planet. There’s a balance between animals, plants and insects – they’re all a part of the ecology.” 
 
 So what’s going to happen to Diego? Turns out he’s the heir to one of the first herds of Scottish Highlanders ever raised in the country: Farmer also owns the Pitcher Mountain Farm in Stoddard, where that breed of cow has been raised for more than five decades. His thick neck, strong body and gentle disposition make him a good candidate for breeding stock, Farmer said. 
 
 (Caitlin Andrews can be reached at 369-3309, candrews@cmonitor.com or on Twitter at @ActualCAndrews.) ||||| It seems like every other week someone gets ill from raw milk. The most recent incident occurred last month in West Michigan, when a 31-year-old woman and a six-year-old girl from different counties fell ill after drinking raw milk from a farm called Green Pastures. The Centers for Disease Control have released updated information on the link between raw milk and outbreaks of E. Coli infections, warning that a record number of such outbreaks were reported between 2010 and 2012. 
 
 We have a fraught relationship with raw milk in the US, but elsewhere the routine consumption of raw milk is far more normalized. Raw milk vending machines, for example, have recently been installed all over Europe, allowing unpasteurized dairy fiends to get a fix on the regular. The Middle East is long accustomed to drinking raw milk, and we're not talking about cows or goats here. There, the milk of the humble dromedary—the camel—is so prized that camel owners often forego drinking the milk themselves, saving it for special occasions or when guests drop by. The Bedouins believe it to have curative powers, and anecdotal evidence seems to support such assertions: some parents of autistic children claim the milk improves sociability and mood in their kids. 
 
 Walid Abdul-Wahab believes that raw camel milk packs a double-whammy of good health. The Saudi Arabian native is the founder of Desert Farms, a California-based company that sources raw camel milk from a network of Amish farms in the Midwest (the Amish have a history with raw milk—in 2011, a Pennsylvania farm was raided and its owner accused of smuggling the dairy into Washington, D.C., where its sale was illegal). We caught up with Abdul-Wahab to find out about what's going on his product. 
 
 Desert Farms camel milk. Photo courtesy of Desert Farms. 
 
 MUNCHIES: So, why camel milk? Why did you decide to start selling it in the US? Walid Abdul-Wahab: I grew up in Saudi Arabia, where camel milk was ingrained in our culture. In the Middle East it's used to honor your guests. Then I realized, by reading religious texts, that people felt that it could actually benefit the ill, people with diabetes, with autism. They didn't mention these diseases by name, but they described their symptoms and all these prophets were recommending camels' milk. I wanted to try to bring something positive from my home country to the US, when there's often a barrier of communication between the two countries, and a lot of misconceptions about the Middle East. I also wanted to sell camel milk because of its health benefits—it's been helping a lot of children with autism. 
 
 Yeah, I've read about that. How does it help? There is no scientific research behind this yet so we don't make any of those kinds of claims. But I can tell you what I've heard from people who have tried it. The anti-inflammatory properties are the major factor that helps improve brain function. Anything you consume that's anti-inflammatory reduces the amount of toxins in found in your gut, and reducing those toxins has a clear effect on the brain. It improves function. That's why all these autistic children are on very strict diets, particularly gluten-free. Any food that has gluten in creates inflammation, and that's exactly what you want to avoid. 
 
 What does the milk taste like? Camels seem like pretty funky animals. The milk tastes sweeter than cow's milk, sometimes quite earthy. It isn't repulsive at all. It's a very clean taste, closer to cow's milk than any other. 
 
 Where are these camels that you're getting the milk from? All our farms are run by the Amish community, in places like Ohio and Pennsylvania. The camels on these farms actually come from Australia. Camels run wild over there—they're an invasive species—so a couple of years ago these Amish farmers imported them by the thousands. 
 
 Why does the Amish community have a monopoly over these camel farms? The Amish knew about camels' milk a while before anyone else did. The first farmer in the US to milk a camel, that I know of, was one of our farmers in Missouri. He told the Amish community that it could be a really good source of income, and, if it doesn't work out, then we'll have camels for camel rides at Christmas for the living Nativity scenes. It was a win-win situation for them. 
 
 So why do you offer raw camels' milk in addition to pasteurized? Are you concerned about reports linking serious illnesses to the consumption of raw milk? I believe that raw milk is more nutritious. It all depends on how much you trust the source of the milk—if I were in the middle of the desert and someone offered me camels' milk and I didn't know where it came from, I'd rather have pasteurized. But if I trusted the source of the milk and knew exactly where it was coming from, knew how healthy the animal was, and what it was eating, then I'll drink the raw milk right away. People seem to tolerate the raw milk a lot better than the pasteurized. It makes sense that if you're heating up milk to the point where you're killing bacteria, you're also killing beneficial bacteria. The way most dairy processors are heating their milk is at a ridiculously high temperature. They heat it at 275 degrees Fahrenheit for two to three seconds. But you can heat the milk slowly at a moderate temperature, as we do, which keeps the flavor and the nutrition inside. The way we look at it is that these reports state illnesses in their hundreds within a year, which I see as insignificant when you compare it to something like smoking. It really depends on the treatment of the farm. A lot of these breakouts are because these farms are not inspected. If the government had a system in place for inspecting raw milk farms in the way it does pasteurized milk farms, I don't think we'd have the same problem. 
 
 Given the restrictions that some states have on the sale of raw milk, how does that work for you? We are not allowed to sell in every state, but what we do offer is a herd share. You basically buy into being a member of the farm, so you're a part-owner of the camels. If you own the livestock then you can drink it wherever you are. That's a very common practice in the raw dairy industry. But most of our customers live in states that allow raw milk. California is our biggest state. There, raw milk is legal and we sell in nine locations of the store Lassenes Market. Right now we're also finalizing a deal with Whole Foods—they're going to be carrying our pasteurized camel milk at 40 of their stores in northern California. 
 
 What's the deal with the "colostrum" I saw on your website? It sounds intense. Colostrum is basically the first milk that comes out of the female camel when her baby is born. It's extra-nutritious, helping to get the new baby healthy and strong as fast as possible. Colostrum has been known for hundreds of years, regardless of the mammal. It's the ultimate superfood. For us it's very popular—whenever we get a baby calf we always notify our customers, and within a couple of hours it sells out. It's our fastest-selling item, and is also very rare—we only get, like, four or five bottles at a time, and that's reflected in the price—half a bottle costs $40. It's just milk, so it tastes basically the same as the milk that the mother produces later—a little thicker and more sour—but it's much darker in color, like a dark yellow. 
 
 Wow. Thanks for talking to me, Walid.
– So much for sharing the good news about a newborn calf named Pitcher Diego. A New Hampshire farm that posted a video of the Scottish Highland calf is coming under fire from animal rights supporters who don't want the animal to be slaughtered, the AP reports. The video, posted on Facebook, has gotten nearly 13 million views and sparked a heated debate about eating meat. Many of the comments against the video are from people angry because they think the calf will be slaughtered or had been ripped away from its mother. The Concord Monitor reports Yankee Farmer's Market posted the video of Pitcher Diego, who was born during a snowstorm. The calf—tied up with a red rope—stares into the cameras as he is warmed by an off-screen hair dryer. Some people are trying to drive down the farm's reviews using Facebook's rating system. Several also have offered to adopt the calf. "I'm not sure how you get that much negativity out of a picture of a baby cow," said Farm owner Brian Farmer. Farmer said he was taken aback by the negative reaction, given his animals roam and graze freely in pastures and are raised without antibiotics or hormones. "We are trying to give them the best life possible," Farmer said. "When you raise them that way, they are healthy and happy." He says Pitcher Diego has been returned to its mother, and its thick neck, strong body, and gentle disposition make it a good candidate for breeding—rather than a trip to the butcher.