Cows for Dairy

Happy Cows Make Happy…Oh wait: there’s NO SUCH THING as a happy dairy cow.

As with any mammal, cows produce milk only when pregnant and stop after their calves have been weaned. Dairy cows are forced to give birth to one calf per year. This is incredibly taxing on their bodies, as a cow’s gestation period is nine-months, same as a human’s. Dairy cows are artificially re-impregnated while they are still lactating from their previous birthing, so their bodies are still producing milk during seven months of the nine-month gestation period.

When a dairy cow gives birth, the calf is immediately taken away. Female calves become dairy cows themselves, subject to the same fate as their mothers. Male calves are sold to veal farms where they’re tethered to a tiny stall, unable to move, deprived of food and within a few months, slaughtered for meat.

A mother’s heart in every dairy cow’s body.

Having their calves taken away at birth, is maybe the most tortured part of a dairy cow’s life. 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.”

These gentle and sensitive animals have their newborns taken away from them—horrific enough. But dairy cows today are forced to produce 100 pounds of milk a day—ten times more than they would produce naturally. Which means their bodies are under constant stress and they suffer all kinds of health problems.

Got What???

So what diseases are in that glass of milk, exactly?

Well, for example, about half of the country’s dairy cows suffer from mastitis, a bacterial infection of their udders. Growth hormones and unnatural milking schedules cause dairy cows’ udders to become painful and so heavy that they sometimes drag on the ground, resulting in frequent infections and overuse of antibiotics.

And there’s more disease: Bovine Leukemia Virus, Bovine Immunodeficiency Virus, and Johne’s disease (whose human counterpart is Crohn’s disease) are also rampant in modern dairies, but they usually go unnoticed because either they’re hard to detect or have a long incubation period. Because dairy cows are given high energy feeds to keep milk production high, they can suffer from metabolic disorders including ketosis, which can be fatal, and laminitis, which causes lameness. And we’re not done with disease yet: “Milk Fever” occurs in a dairy cow when milk secretion depletes calcium faster than it can be replenished in the blood.

In a healthy environment, cows can live to be twenty-five. Today, they’re sold to slaughter in three or four years because their bodies can’t continue to produce that much milk. In fact, the abuse wreaked on the bodies of dairy cows is so intense that the dairy industry is a major source of “downed animals”—animals too sick or injured to be able to walk or even stand.

Recent investigations have videotaped slaughterhouse workers beating, dragging and pushing downed dairy cows with bulldozers to move them to slaughter.

A milk moustache says, “who cares about the environment?”

You cannot drink milk or eat cheese or any other dairy and be an environmentalist. Simple as that. Drink milk and care about the environment? You might as well get a Hummer.

Cow’s milk is an inefficient food source. It takes a huge amount of grain and other foodstuffs cycled through cows to produce a small amount of milk. And the production of milk is a disastrous source of water pollution. A dairy cow produces 120 pounds of waste every day – about the same as that of two dozen people, but with no toilets, sewers, or treatment plants. In Lancaster County, Pa., manure from dairy cows is destroying the Chesapeake Bay, and in California, which produces one-fifth of the country’s total supply of milk, the manure from dairy farms has poisoned vast expanses of underground water, rivers, and streams. In the Central Valley of California, the cows produce as much excrement as a city of 21 million people. And according to a U.S. Senate report on animal waste, even a smallish farm of 200 cows will produce as much nitrogen as in the sewage from a community of 5,000 to 10,000 people.

Dairy sucks for your health.

Dairy products are a health hazard. They contain no fiber or complex carbohydrates and are laden with saturated fat and cholesterol. They are contaminated with cow’s blood and pus and are frequently contaminated with pesticides, hormones, and antibiotics. Dairy products are linked to allergies, constipation, obesity, heart disease, cancer, and other diseases.

The late Dr. Benjamin Spock, America’s leading authority on child care, spoke out against feeding cow’s milk to children, saying it can cause anemia, allergies, and insulin-dependent diabetes and in the long term, will set kids up for obesity and heart disease, America’s number one cause of death.

As for osteoporosis, dairy products may actually cause it, not prevent it. The high-protein content of dairy leaches calcium from the body. Population studies, backed up by a groundbreaking Harvard study of more than 75,000 nurses, suggest that drinking milk can actually cause osteoporosis.

For more information on the health issues caused by dairy see this link to the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine: http://www.pcrm.org/health/veginfo/dairy.html

The death of the myth of the happy cow.

These sensitive, gentle and naturally devoted mothers have their newborns ripped away from them at birth, over and over. Their bodies are genetically manipulated, artificially inseminated to keep them producing huge, unnatural amounts of milk, which leaves them diseased and depleted. So sick that they cannot stand or walk, these dairy cows are deposited at slaughterhouses where they are pushed or bulldozed or dragged into slaughter.

And so ends the life of the dairy industry’s “happy cow.”