Cows produce milk for the same reason that humans do—to nourish their young—but calves born on dairy farms are taken from their mothers when they are just one day old and fed milk replacers so that humans can have the milk instead.[1,2]
In order to keep a steady supply of milk, the cows are repeatedly impregnated. Several times a day, dairy cows are hooked by their udders to electronic milking machines, which can cause the cows to suffer electrical shocks, painful lesions, and mastitis.
Some spend their entire lives standing on concrete floors; others are crammed into massive mud lots.
Although cows would naturally make only enough milk to meet the needs of their calves (around 16 pounds a day), genetic manipulation, antibiotics, and hormones are used to force each cow to produce more than 18,000 pounds of milk a year (an average of 50 pounds a day).[3,4,5]
Cows on factory farms suffer from a variety of health problems including mastitis, a painful inflammation of the mammary glands. In order to further increase profits, Bovine Growth Hormone (BGH), a synthetic hormone, is now being injected into cows to get them to produce even more milk. The hormones adversely affect the cows’ health and increase the rate of birth defects in their calves.[6] BGH may also cause breast and prostate cancer in humans.[7]
Cows have a natural lifespan of about 25 years and can produce milk for eight or nine years, but the stress caused by factory farm conditions leads to disease, lameness, and reproductive problems that render cows worthless to the dairy industry by the time they are four or five years old, at which time they are sent to the slaughterhouse.[8,9]
cruelty in a crate
Few consumers realize that veal is a direct by-product of the dairy industry. In order for dairy cows to produce milk, they must be impregnated. While female calves are slaughtered or added to the dairy herd, many male calves are taken from their mothers when they are as young as one day old and chained in tiny stalls to be raised for veal.[10,11]
The confinement is so extreme that they cannot even turn around or lie down comfortably.[12] As author John Robbins notes, “The veal calf would actually have more space if, instead of chaining him in such a stall, you stuffed him into the trunk of a subcompact car and kept him there for his entire life.”
Many veal calves are deliberately kept anemic in order to produce light-colored meat, which fetches higher prices in restaurants. Their liquid-based, iron-deficient diets cause numerous health problems.
Motherless and alone, they suffer from ulcers, diarrhea, pneumonia, and lameness.[13,14] After three to 18 weeks of this deprivation, they are trucked to the slaughterhouse, where their young lives are taken from them.
Cows are extremely gentle and affectionate animals, forming strong bonds with one another, particularly between mother and child. As Michael Klaper M.D. recalls “The very saddest sound in all my memory was burned into my awareness at age five on my uncle’s dairy farm in Wisconsin. A cow had given birth to a beautiful male calf...On the second day after birth, my uncle took the calf from the mother and placed him in the veal pen in the barn—only ten yards away, in plain view of his mother. The mother cow could see her infant, smell him, hear him, but could not touch him, comfort him, or nurse him. The heartrending bellows that she poured forth—minute after minute, hour after hour, for five long days—were excruciating to listen to. They are the most poignant and painful auditory memories I carry in my brain.”
Via
