Daily Pain and Early Death
Cow’s Milk Is a Cruel and Unhealthy Product
This page on dairy cruelty includes these key facts:
- Cow's natural lifespan is up to thirty years
- Cow's in farm factories live as low as four years due to exhaustion.
- Female cows are artificially inseminated shortly after their first birthdays.
- Male calves on day one are chained in tiny stalls for weeks to be raised for veal.
- Calves are force fed milk replacers which includes blood so that their mothers’ milk can be sold to humans.
Given the chance, cows nurture their young and form lifelong friendships with one another. They play games and have a wide range of emotions and personality traits. But most cows raised for the dairy industry are intensively confined, leaving them unable to fulfill their most basic desires, such as nursing their calves, even for a single day. They are treated like milk-producing machines and are genetically manipulated and may be pumped full of antibiotics and hormones to produce more milk. While cows suffer on these farms, humans who drink their milk increase their chances of developing heart disease, diabetes, cancer, and many other ailments.
Cows Suffer on Dairy Farms
Cows produce milk for the same reason that humans to nourish their young but calves on dairy farms are taken away from their mothers when they are just one day old. They are fed milk replacers (including cattle blood) so that their mothers’ milk can be sold to humans.
Female cows are artificially inseminated shortly after their first birthdays. After giving birth, they lactate for ten months and are then inseminated again, continuing the cycle. Some spend their entire lives standing on concrete floors; others are confined to massive, crowded lots, where they are forced to live amid their own feces. A North Carolina dairy closed its doors following revelations from a whistleblower that the cows were forced to eat, walk, and sleep in knee-deep waste. An investigation into a Pennsylvania farm that ships tons of milk for cheese production in Maryland revealed animals who were wallowing in their own manure in filthy barns with no bedding, while more than half of the cows who were being milked had leg joints that were swollen, ulcerated, or missing hair.
All forms of dairy farming involve forcibly impregnating cows using a very invasive procedure that involves a constraining device and the insertion of semen through her rectum and vagina into her uterus. This involves a person inserting his arm far into the cow's rectum in order to position the uterus, and then forcing an instrument into her vagina. The restraining apparatus used is commonly called a “rape rack.” All is done with no pain killer.
Cows have a natural lifespan of about twenty years and can produce milk for eight or nine years. However, the stress caused by the conditions on factory farms leads to disease, lameness, and reproductive problems that render cows worthless to the dairy industry by the time that they’re four or five years old, at which time they are sent to be slaughtered.
The udders of dairy cows can become extremely distended, the result of a short but intense life of excessive milk production, up to six times more than her body was designed by nature to produce. The calves, for whom the milk was perfectly formulated, got little or none of it.
On any given day, there are more than nine million cows on US dairy farms—about 12 million fewer than there were in 1950. Yet milk production has continued to increase, from 116 billion pounds of milk per year in 1950 to 215 billion pounds in 2017. Normally, these animals would produce only enough milk to meet the needs of their calves, but genetic manipulation—and, in some cases, antibiotics and hormones—is used to cause each cow to produce more than 22,000 pounds of milk each year. Cows are also fed unnatural, high-protein diets—which can include chicken feathers and fish—because their natural diet of grass would not provide the nutrients that they need to produce such massive amounts of milk.
Mastitis
Painful inflammation of the mammary glands, or mastitis, is common among cows raised for their milk, and it is one of dairy farms’ most frequently cited reasons for sending cows to slaughter. There are about 150 bacteria that can cause the disease, one of which is E. coli. Symptoms are not always visible, so milk’s somatic cell count (SCC) is checked to determine whether the milk is infected. Somatic cells include white blood cells and skin cells that are normally shed from the lining of the udder. As in humans, white blood cells—also known as “pus”—are produced as a means of combating infection. The SCC of healthy milk is below 100,000 cells per milliliter; however, the dairy industry is allowed to combine milk from all the cows in a herd to arrive at a “bulk tank” somatic cell count (BTSCC). Milk with a maximum BTSCC of 750,000 cells per milliliter can be sold. A BTSCC of 600,000 or more generally indicates that more than two-thirds of the cows in the herd are suffering from udder infections.
Studies have shown that providing cows with cleaner housing, more space, and better diets, bedding, and care lowers their milk’s SCC as well as their incidence of mastitis. A Danish study of cows subjected to automated milking systems found “acutely elevated cell counts during the first year compared with the previous year with conventional milking. The increase came suddenly and was synchronized with the onset of automatic milking.” Instead of improving conditions in factory farms or easing cows’ production burden, the dairy industry is exploring the use of cattle who have been genetically manipulated to be resistant to mastitis.
Organic Milk Producing Cows Are Miserable
In the reality of marketing, the Organic Happy Cow is a myth. No matter how “humane” the marketers want to spin the truth, the modern dairy industry’s business model is built upon the exploitation of pregnant females, forcing them to birth lots of unwanted babies. Millions of dairy cows live tortured, miserable lives while making a significant contribution to greenhouse gases. The bucolic cow and family farm barely exist.
Organic cows must also be kept free from antibiotic use. Painful inflammation of the mammary glands, or mastitis, is common among cows raised for their milk, and it is one of dairy farms’ most frequently cited reasons for sending cows to slaughter.
ALL dairy cows, those who produce organic milk or not, those raised on pasture or on feed lots, and those raised on small independent farms or large factory farms end up in slaughterhouses. No farmer is going to keep an older, less-productive dairy cow alive when he could easily bring in a new, more productive cow in her place. Most cows decline in producing milk four and seven years old, an adolescent in a natural lifespan of 25 to 30 years.
The spent cows are sent to slaughter if the decline in milk production which makes the cow no longer economically viable to keep alive. They may begin to show a common dairy herd diseases such as mastitis or bovine leukemia. They may simply be too weak.
Downer cows are an industry term for spent dairy cows who are too weak or sick to stand on their feet any longer. Some investigations of downer cows have documented on video cows being dragged by chains and prodded with electric prods to get them onto trucks to then transport them to slaughterhouses.
The downer cow issue really brings to light the extent to which these cows are simply viewed as commodities and how the meat and dairy industry and their powerful government allies will fight to legally defend even the most egregious abuses of farmed animals, especially when it means saving money. Small dairy farmers may adopt many of the inhumane practices of the mega dairies to compete.
A “spent” dairy cow who has been stunned with a captive bolt pistol which allegedly renders her unconscious in preparation for slaughter. Stunning is not a perfect science, and some animals are still fully or semi-conscious when slaughtered.
Dairy cows are kept perpetually pregnant may go to slaughter while pregnant if they become unprofitable before giving birth. And so while workers stun them, hang them upside down, cut open their throats to let the blood from their body drain out, cut off their legs, and pull off their skin, all that time, there is a calf inside them, fighting and dying a horrifying death. The calf could still be dying but still living, still suffering terribly at the time of her mother's dismemberment and disembowelment. A large percentage of the slaughtered cows are pregnant.
The organic cow slaughtered body will be mixed with thousands of others to become the cheap meat for hamburger and pet food. Her hide, bones and cartilage will be used for leather clothing, accessories and upholstery, and used in such innocuous things like gelatin, chewy candies, marshmallows, asphalt, and construction-grade adhesives.
Newborn dairy calves are taken away from their mothers typically on day one, causing extreme separation anxiety for both newborn and mother, who carries her baby for 9 months like human mothers do. Mother cows have been known to wail and mourn the loss of their calves up to weeks on end. The typical dairy cow experiences this cycle of losing her baby at least four and up to seven times in her short life as a milk producer. It is worth noting here that in many studies animals choose physical pain over psychological pain when given a choice, suggesting that emotional pain is much harder to deal with.
The Veal Connection
If you drink milk, you’re subsidizing the veal industry. While female calves are slaughtered or kept alive to produce milk, male calves are often taken away from their mothers when they are as young as one day old to be chained in tiny stalls for three to 18 weeks and raised for veal. Calves raised for veal are fed a milk substitute that is designed to make them gain at 2 to 3 pounds per day, and their diet is purposely low in iron so that their flesh stays pale because of anemia. In addition to suffering from diarrhea, pneumonia, and lameness, calves raised for veal are terrified and desperate for their mothers.
There is no veal industry without the dairy industry. Veal farmers depend on dairy farmers to provide them with a steady supply of bovine babies. About half of all calves born are male with no use in milk production. They are sent to veal-producing operations or directly to auctions where they are sold and slaughtered when they are just a few days old. Male calves used for veal production suffer a crude castration process and are killed after 4 months spent in small crates or pens.
Stop Cow Misery
Stop cow cruelty. The best way to save cows from the misery of factory farms is to stop buying milk and other dairy products. Plant-derived milks are healthier and better for the environment. Many delicious nondairy products are available in grocery and health-food stores.
