Not all photos need to be graphic to be moving or to make a point, and we’re thankful that there’s one everyone can stomach looking at that still brings awareness to a huge issue.
The issue at hand is the dairy industry’s association and cooperation with veal farms.
The above image might seem vague and almost surreal, but inside all of those crates are newborn calves that were taken from their mourning mother just one hour after they were birthed.
The new mother cows only had time to lick them, clean up the birth, and initially bond with them before the calves were torn from their mothers. Neither of them will ever see each other again.
Normally, calves would stay with their mothers until they are weaned off of their milk, which could take anywhere from three to eight months. With this horrible practice at dairy farms, the mothers have been documented as bellowing for days and weeks as they call out for their calf.
Farm Sanctuary explains on its website,
“Like all mammals, dairy cows must be impregnated in order to produce milk. Cows in the dairy industry spend their lives in a constant cycle of impregnation, birth, and milking with just a few short months of rest between pregnancies.”
This means that the baby cows are merely a byproduct of the dairy farm’s core goal, and since the boys are even more useless than the girl calves, all of the boys are then raised in these huts until they are slaughtered to become veal. Even girl calves are taken from their mothers because no calf is allowed to take the mother’s milk, since every drop the baby drinks is wasted profit.
In the huts at the veal farm, they are chained and unable to move very far to keep their meat “tender” until they can be killed in about six weeks.
Life for these sensitive animals who can form friendships and remember the past is grim and inhumane, but even living six weeks is something that many boy cows aren’t allowed. In some instances, the boys are removed from their mother and subsequently shot dead within a few days of their birth.
All so dairy farms can continue to churn a profit and not waste money on male cows. Learn how to cut down on your dairy diet here, as every little bit helps.
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This article (This One Photo Shows How Consuming Dairy Products Actually DOES Hurt Cows) is free and open source. You have permission to republish this article under a Creative Commons license with attribution to the author and TrueActivist.com
