#the only actual benefit to raw milk over pasteurized milk is that the distinctive goat smell/flavor

[tyrannosaurus-trainwreck]

I say the below as someone who, pre-bird flu bullshit, bought raw milk every so often.

Ultra-high pasteurized milk doesn't work for a lot of cheese-making things, and it's less than ideal for a few other homemade dairy products. There's precisely one brand of milk available locally that's pasteurized but not ultra-high pasteurized. All the goat milk brands are UHP.

It's trivially easy to pasteurize things at home, and all the recipes I was using involved temperatures and times that exceeded what you need for simple pasteurization. (This is of course off the table until we can, and will, vaccinate livestock for H5N1.)

Under normal circumstances, the risks of drinking raw milk collected under sanitary conditions from animals that have been vaccinated against and tested for the standard range of human-transmissible diseases aren't super high. Testing, treating, and vaccinating herds made huge inroads even before everybody got sold on the "You have to pasteurize it even if you milked the cows yourself this morning. Yes, for real." agenda.

Given the bird flu thing and the incoming Regulations Are The Real Fascism, Actually crowd, and the strong likelihood that the people selling you the raw milk "for pet consumption only" that they claim is going to make you live forever are also full on anti-vax, anti-science, and anti-government-telling-them-to-spend-money-on-stuff weirdos, the odds of the milk having been collected in sanitary conditions from verifiably healthy animals are... not great! They're very much not great! Please do not do this!