As it turns out, I am more sympathetic to this particular argument than most others, if for no other reason than I myself was an “ethical vegetarian” (an oxymoron, of course, as I ultimately came to understand) for over nine years before finally going vegan.   I too was unaware of the sordid Truths that the milk industry had purposefully hidden from me (and most others) for the previous 4+ decades of my life: namely, that in actuality there is no independent milk industry at all; that the meat industry & the milk industry are actually ONE & THE SAME.

To make matters even worse, milk cows – even before they are hauled off to a brutally slaughter at the tender age of four – actually suffer far greater traumas & abuses than their meat-cow cousins. Milk, just like is meat, is murder – with a heavy dose of mourning and mutilation thrown in to boot.

Consider the following facts:

*Dairy cows, like meat cows, are almost exclusively confined for the entirety of the shortened lives in disgusting conditions. And unlike meat cows, dairy cows suffer the additional torture of being repeatedly raped (or “artificially inseminated” according to the industry; a process whereby each female cow is tied to a “rape rack” and then forcibly penetrated — both anally & vaginally — in order to assure an unwanted pregnancy) …

*Roughly ten months later she gives birth, and within 24 hours of doing so (and despite her enraged protests — and ultimately mournful cries) her baby calf is forcibly taken from her …

*She is then confined & mechanically milked for roughly 16 months — forced to produce up to ten times more milk than she normally would have for her stolen baby during the same amount of time; a radical “over-milking” that is cost efficient for the farmer, and yet that is extremely painful for the cow — frequently causing a chronic swelling (mastitis) of her udder …

*This process (from forced pregnancy – to stolen calf – to forced over-milking) is repeated with our gentle girl at least three more times, after which she can no longer produce enough milk to be profitable — and is then shipped off at the tender age of 4-6 (cows have a normal lifespan of 20-25) to a slaughterhouse to be ruthlessly murdered and ground into cheap meat …

*Her children, disturbingly enough, have it no better … If she gives birth to a healthy female calf, the child is set aside to be made pregnancy-ready as quickly as possible — essentially taking her mother’s place once her mother has been made into hamburger …

*And if she gives birth to a healthy male calf, her child is put into a tiny pen and quickly fattened up to then be slaughtered and sold as “veal” (over 802,000 — that’s over eight hundred thousand — veal calves were murdered in the U.S. alone … in 2012 alone!)   In addition to these atrocities, all unhealthy calves (both male & female) are generally disposed of more “efficiently”, using far less “humane” methods …

*Humans are the only species on the planet that imbibes mammary excretions past childhood, and we are of course also the only species on the planet that takes mammary “nourishment” from a species other than our own. The unnaturalness of this behavior explains why the ingestion of animal milk is a primary cause of osteoporosis, breast cancer & prostate cancer in humans. Dairy product consumption has also been conclusively linked to heart disease, a higher rate & intensity of internal infections, irritable bowel syndrome & other digestive difficulties.

So, my Friends … It all boils down to a series of most inconvenient Truths:

*Truth #01: Consuming dairy products is both unnatural & unnecessary.

*Truth #02: Consuming dairy products is extremely unhealthy.

*Truth #03: Consuming dairy products directly funds horrific cruelty.

 

There is no such thing as a “Happy Cow” on a milk farm, my Friends. You have been lied to and manipulated long enough … The insidious Truth is now out, and the ball is now in your court … Please act accordingly … Thank you.

 

Current status of this Myth: Purged
Justification it provides for eating animals: NONE

“The whole dairy business is founded upon stealing: forcibly stealing calves from their mothers and forcibly stealing mother’s milk from those calves. We have become desensitized to just how incredibly cruel and unjust this truly is … The mother cow cannot fight the hands that steal her baby away or tell us in human words how terribly we are hurting her. And yet her enormous pain is patently obvious to anyone with eyes to see or ears to hear. For us to ignore her suffering and the suffering of her baby – hundreds, thousands, millions of times over every day – is also to ignore and indeed to fully deny our own integrity & decency.” ~ inspired by Will Tuttle

“It did not occur to me originally that the dairy industry was an equally vile gulag for animals. And yet once I saw firsthand the horror that veal calves endure, the emotional trauma that mother cows endure when their calves are taken from them (not to mention when they are repeatedly & forcibly inseminated against their will), and the sheer carnage of the slaughterhouse where all milk cows end up at a still young age, dairy very easily became the next atrocity to cross off my list.” ~ inspired by Philip Wollen

Filed under: Minimizing the Myths of Meat by Scaughdt