Myth #48: “But dairy cows need to be milked.”
It is true that if a dairy cow is not relieved of her milk, her udders can become painfully distended. Of course, this almost never happens in nature because cows, like all other mammals – including humans, only lactate while nursing their young after having given birth to them. In essence, then, the only reason that dairy cows “need to be milked” is because the dairy farmer has forcibly impregnated her and then stolen her baby calf after it was born. As such, it is absolutely preposterous for a dairy farmer to even indirectly claim to be milking a cow for her own benefit — when those same farmers are the ones who caused her suffering in the first place!
In addition, this argument completely neglects the fact that dairy cows are forced to produce far more milk than they ever would naturally. Left to her own life, the average cow would produce one gallon of milk per day for her baby calf … On the average dairy farm (where cows are frequently given large quantities of hormones to keep their milk production high — hormones like “Insulin-like Growth Factor One” that have been scientifically linked to breast, prostate and colon cancer in humans), she is hooked up to a machine that sucks 6-10 gallons from her udders over the same 24-hour period.
Logically, this aggressive over-milking causes the average cow’s udder to quickly bloat well beyond its normal size, resulting in severe pain and frequently leading to the development of open sores and mastitis. Because of this, over 50 different antibiotics are regularly used to control the infections that invariably ensue — antibiotics that not only make it into the customer’s milk supply, but that also provide a happy breeding ground for fast-mutating super-viruses. The prevalence of these serious health problems explains why the FDA of the United States legally allows 750,000 animal blood & puss cells and 20,000 living bacteria per cubic centimeter of milk produced – which is, without a doubt, patently disgusting.
All in all, regardless of where a dairy cow is found — whether painfully enslaved on a factory farm or coddled gently on an organic one — one thing remains certain: the only time she ever truly “needs to be milked” is shortly after she has been deeply abused — and shortly before she will be brutally murdered.
Current status of this Myth: Cancelled
Justification it provides for eating animals: NONE
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