SentientMedia.org
November 2018
There are more than 250 million dairy cows all over the world. In the United States, dairy cows collectively produce nearly 87.5 tonnes of milk every year.
Dairy farming has a wholesome ring to it. After all, it’s not about the
unnecessary slaughtering of innocent animals. Or is it?
What you don’t know about dairy farming can hurt you.
Not only are dairy farms dangerous for the animals who produce dairy
products, but they’re also dangerous for humans. Ordinary products you pick
up at the supermarket could have a nasty impact on your health.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s talk about what dairy farming is and
what it means for your diet, lifestyle, and commitment to animal safety.
What Is Dairy Farming?
Dairy farming is the practice of raising cows for the purposes of
obtaining their milk. We most associate a dairy farm with the milk itself,
but this agricultural practice also produces butter, cheese, yogurt, and
other common household staples.
Just like with humans, female mammals produce milk to nourish their young.
The milk contains lots of fat, certain proteins, bacteria, and other
elements to help baby animals reach their greatest potential. In terms of
consumption, cow milk is intended for baby cows. And when I say intended, I
mean as in evolved over millions of years to be the nutrition of baby cows.
The same goes for goats’ milk, which is often used to produce cheese and
other dairy products.
Dairy farming can only operate because animals like cows give birth to
young. When cows have calves, they begin to lactate. Dairy farmers extract
the milk from lactation for the purposes of creating milk, yogurt, cheese,
and other dairy products for human consumption. A little later we’ll get to
what happens to the calves that their mothers’ milk was intended for.
The image you may sometimes see of a young man or woman manually milking a
cow into a pale is extremely outdated. Modern dairy farmers use vacuum tubes
and milk vats to streamline the process of collecting and processing milk.
On dairy farms, these animals have little utility beyond breeding and
bearing calves.
Dairy Farming Statistics
There are more than 250 million dairy cows all over the world. In the
United States, dairy cows collectively produce nearly 87.5 tonnes of milk
every year.
Most dairy milk goes toward three specific purposes: drinkable milk,
American cheese, and butter. The rest, a much smaller fraction, is used to
create yogurt, ice cream, custard, sour cream, and more.
You might even be familiar with dairy farming mascots. Belle, for instance,
is the jersey cow that represents Bluebell, perhaps one of the most popular
brands of ice cream in the world.
Every year, Americans drink an average of 20.4 gallons of milk each year.
That includes drinking it straight out of a glass — or carton — as well as
consuming it on breakfast cereal and in other popular foods.
These facts remain true even though 65 percent of Americans are lactose
intolerant. That means their bodies can’t properly digest lactase.
How Are Cows Treated on Dairy Farms?
If you imagine family-run farms full of bright-eyed children when you think
of dairy farms, you might want to do some research. Today’s dairy farms
don’t come out of Norman Rockwell paintings.
We humans have learned to mechanize nearly every aspect of our consumerism.
We use factory farming methods to extract milk from dairy cows, which by
definition means that these animals have become nothing but a means to an
end.
Let’s look at some of the ways in which dairy farming abuses cows and other
milk-bearing animals.
Forced into Reproduction Over and Over
Dairy farming has two main methods of production: manual and artificial.
Some dairy farming operations still allow cows and bulls to mate naturally,
but an increasing number use artificial insemination to speed up the
breeding cycle.
It’s simple math: the more frequently a cow gets pregnant, the more milk she
can produce.
Little is any thought is given to the cow’s rights as an animal to live a
happy, natural life. There is nothing natural about modern dairy farms.
Cows that are forced to breed over and over again, regardless of the method,
are treated solely as milk machines. They aren’t valued as animals but
appropriated for human needs.
Imagine a human woman getting pregnant within a couple months of delivering
a child. Then imagine her getting pregnant over and over again for the rest
of their life. It’s hard on the body and mind, especially since cows’ calves
are taken away from them just hours after birth.
Facing Subpar Living Standards
Cows are housed close together with other cows and forced to bear offspring
after offspring. A dairy cow is no longer useful when she can’t procreate,
because then she will also stop lactating.
Even during her calf-bearing years, she’s often stuffed in a tiny stall and
fed unnatural substances (hormones, antibiotics) to impact her constitution
and milk production. She doesn’t get to roam free as part of a herd or raise
her calves as part of a family unit.
And no, cows aren’t humans. Neither are goats. Nevertheless, they deserve
basic, common decency.
A cow that can’t move around develops all types of problems, from digestive
issues to joint inflammation. Worse, the cows can’t escape their fates. They
have no control over what dairy farming does to them, and no understanding
or reasoning about their predicament as part of the merciless industrial
machinery.
Standing on Concrete Floors
The concrete floors on which dairy cows must stand can cause them to develop
abscesses and other diseases of the hoof. They lose their ability to walk
properly, and their joints become overburdened by repetitive breeding and
constant lactating.
Furthermore, concrete floors allow feces and urine to collect. Cows are
often left to stand in their own filth because they lack room to move.
Urine and feces promote bacterial growth and create unsafe conditions for
the cows. Specifically, the urine and feces weaken the hoof walls and create
bacterial infections that cows need to be fed antibiotics against.
Existing on Crowded Lots
Space comes at a premium on a dairy farm. The more cows a farmer can force
into a certain square footage (up to legal limits) results in higher
profits.
Cows and other dairy animals are social creatures, but they’re not meant to
stand flank-to-flank. They’re meant to roam, choose their own company and
social relations, to enjoy open pastures, and procreate naturally.
Dairy farming precludes this right. The animals are crammed as tightly as
possible to maximize milk production. The dairy cows often stand in tiny
stalls that don’t allow them to even turn around, much less wander.
Dairy Cows Live in Their Own Feces
Think about the last time you drank a glass of milk or poured cheese on a
baked potato. The animals that produced your dairy products were forced to
live in their own filth.
While that is certainly harmful to the animals, it’s also dangerous for
human beings. Urinary and fecal contaminants routinely come with milk and
other dairy products. You either accept it, or refuse to buy those products.
Vegans who refuse to consume dairy products want whole, delicious,
uncontaminated food. They don’t want to live on sustenance that could make
them sick.
Forced to Produce Far More Milk Than They Should
Cows and other livestock are only meant to give birth to young at certain
intervals. The cow’s gestation cycle mimics the human one, producing one
calf per year at about nine months between conception and delivery.
They’re given specific hormones and other chemicals to produce more milk
than their calves need. This increases farmers’ profits but decreases the
animals’ quality of life.
Nobody wants to see that happen. Imagine giving a human woman drugs that
would cause her to produce more milk than her infant required. Such a
travesty could impact not only the woman but also her growing child.
Mothers and Calves Are Separated at Birth
The emotional bond between a parent – in the cow’s case, a mother – and a
child is one of the strongest experiences a human can have. That bond has
been forged by millions of years of evolution in mammals, like cows and
humans alike.
Dairy farming doesn’t care about fostering important emotional
relationships. It’s all about profit. That’s why tragically mother cows are
separated from their calves at birth.
Nevertheless, dairy farming often requires separating dam and calf within 24
hours of the calves’ birth. Mother and child can’t bond because they’re
separated too early, resulting in significant damage to both the dam and
calf.
We know that the mother-child bond in humans is cemented through voice,
proximity, and skin-to-skin contact, as well as nourishing the child with
milk. Cows are no different.
And what happens to the calves? They are either removed to raised for veal
(more on that below), bred as eventual replacements to their mothers, or
killed – sometimes in the vicinity of their grieving mothers.
This is one of the major tragedies perpetuated by the dairy industry, every
day, around the world.
Antibiotics and Hormones in Dairy Farming
The important thing to understand about dairy farming is that it’s far
from natural.
Dairy farming isn’t quite as rife with antibiotic and hormone usage as beef
farming, but it still occurs. Mass-spectrum antibiotics are designed to
prevent cows from getting sick in the short term, but in the long term, it
can result in antibiotic-resistant strains of harmful bacteria.
Additionally, it depletes the cows’ natural intestinal flora.
Hormones might cause a cow to grow faster than it should so it can breed and
begin producing milk. That means those hormones get passed on through the
cow’s milk and wind up in gallon jugs on supermarket shelves.
Antibiotic-resistant pathogens are a real existential risk to the health of
not just cows but humanity itself. Pathogens are known to have jumped from
livestock to humans in the past, and factory farming – including dairy
farming – is putting the planet’s population at a constantly increasing
risk.
Negative Side Effects That Dairy Farming Has on Cows
Dairy farming is particularly harmful to cows, especially in large
operations where profits supersede any other priority. Cows don’t get
treated well because, frankly, improved living conditions would cut into
profit margins.
Extreme Stress
As mentioned above, dairy farming involves cramped living conditions that
put stress on the cows. They aren’t able to follow their instincts to graze,
interact with one another, and roam across the grassy land.
Additionally, since calves are not naturally weaned from their mothers, but
taken from them almost immediately, cows experience a profound sense of
loss. They don’t get to nurture their young and bond with them. Instead,
they’re attached to machines that vacuum the milk from their udders.
Diseases Caused by Unconventional Living Standards
If you have kids, you might remember that your child got sick more often
upon going to school. That problem worked itself out as your child developed
a stronger immune system.
This is because germs can pass more easily from one sentient being to
another when they’re put in close quarters. It doesn’t matter if it’s a
Kindergarten classroom or a dairy farm.
Unfortunately, dairy farm puts cows in much closer quarters than students
are in their desks. Germs can run rampant through an entire farm, but the
farms don’t halt operations to heal the cows – they can’t halt, because
their costs would increase and they would no longer be competitive in the
eyes of the consumers who a very used to paying a certain price for milk,
day in day out. Production continues.
Nobody wants to think about drinking the milk of a diseased cow, but it
happens. Remember, in the vast majority of cases dairy farmers put profits
first.
Lameness
Cows, like other livestock, are meant to roam. They need to stretch their
legs, feel the soft earth beneath their hooves, and graze for long periods
of time.
When cows are denied those basic animal rights, they can become lame. Their
hooves get overgrown, they develop abscesses, and they develop joint
problems.
Since they’re bred to simply stand for milk production, no veterinarian
treats their lameness. They’re forced to endure this torture until they
eventually fall down and cannot get back up again, or until they are no
longer productive. Descriptively of the whole industry, dairy cows at the
end of their lives are called “spent cows”. No longer of value, often too
weak to even walk to their own slaughter.
Reproductive Problems
Artificial insemination introduces an entirely new problem with dairy
farming. In many cases, reproductive problems render a cow unable to get
pregnant, which means she’s useless to the dairy farmer.
These animals are destroyed because of their inability to procreate.
Some reproductive problems result in stillborn calves, which may not
stimulate lactation sufficiently. Again, this hurts the dairy farmer’s
profit margins, so he destroys the cow producing “substandard” calves.
And the cycle repeats itself. Female calves get injected with hormones and
bred as soon as they reach puberty. Male calves often get sent to the
operation’s beef program or sold to a beef farmer so it can be killed for
its meat as soon as it’s large enough.
If You Drink Milk, You Might Be Drinking Pus, Too
Cows, just like any other mammal, can develop a condition called mastitis.
It occurs when the mammary glands and udders become inflamed and infected.
The disease causes the cow to produce pus, which is essentially dead blood
cells mixed with diseased tissue.
Mastitis occurs because of unsanitary milking equipment, cows living in
close quarters, and other problems associated with dairy farming. This
doesn’t mean, however, that the cow is taken off the milk assembly line.
The FDA says that milk is “safe” to drink because it’s pasteurized. However,
most parents wouldn’t want to feed their children pus even if they boiled it
to sanitize it themselves first. Would you?
Negative Toll on The Environment
Dairy farming is inherently bad for the environment because it creates an
unnecessarily high number of cows who must consume radical amounts of grain
to stay alive until they are eventually slaughtered or die of disease.
The manure runoff created by dairy farms is inherently unsafe. It makes the
ground near dairy farms infertile and unsafe to use, and it creates issues
with the local water table.
The Veal Industry
People who talk about dairy farming as a peaceful, non-violent industry
often neglect to talk about the veal industry (though, as you’ve seen above,
there’s very little non-violent about dairy). Veal is a more palatable word
for the meat that comes from calves.
What most people don’t understand is that cows are extremely social animals.
Cows and their young have been known to bond for life in the wild, and the
weaning process is extremely protracted in nature, often lasting for much
longer than a calf would normally drink.
Cows on dairy farms are ripped away from their mothers, which is cruel
enough. Then, if they’re candidates for the veal industry, the calves are
placed in small crates to stunt their growth and prevent normal musculature
from developing.
Their muscles atrophy. They develop chronic diarrhea, become inordinately
stressed, and often cannot stand by themselves. They’re kept in these
inhumane conditions for up to six months.
Those calves are then slaughtered for their meat. Dairy farmers can often
make more from the veal industry than from selling milk because veal is
considered a “luxury” food and therefore goes for much higher prices on the
open market.
Conclusion
If you’re a parent, you know that you or your female companion produced milk
to nourish your baby (in most cases). That’s the natural progression. A
mother’s milk production helps fortify babies, improve their immune systems,
and ready them for eating solid foods.
Calves are no different. They need milk from their mothers to develop strong
digestive systems and to build strong bones and muscles. Without it, they
suffer.
Humans are built to drink human milk until they are weaned onto other foods.
The same goes for calves.
Drinking cow’s milk is not only unnatural for human beings, but it also
supports a vile industry in which animals are caged, neglected, and often
abused. Furthermore, it permits dairy farms to continue their work.
The best way to support cows and their animal rights is to abstain from
drinking milk. Don’t participate in animal cruelty in any way. Milk is
cruel.
There are plenty of alternatives, from soy milk to almond milk to oat milk.
These beverages can taste much like cow’s milk, but they don’t contribute to
cruelty. Whether you’re craving a cold glass of milk or your recipe calls
for milk, you don’t have to use the bovine variety. Unless you’re a baby
cow, it’s not for you.
Number of animals killed in the world by the fishing, meat, dairy and egg industries, since you opened this webpage.
0 marine animals
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0 camels / camelids