Jul 27 2008
California bans downed cows slaughter
It sounds great, but behind the headlines, lies a very inconvenient truth about the dairy industry and dairy consumption
California has reinforced its law that protects animals that are too sick to stand on their own legs - downed animals in industry jargon - from being slaughtered. The measure is a direct result of an undercover video made the Humane Society showing crippled animals being tortured by workers at the Westland/Hallmark meat slaughterhouse in Chino. The video made national headlines and the population was rightly appaled at what they saw. it was like watching footage from a concentration camp. The ill animals were hit with electric prods and made to stand with forklifts and high-pressure water hoses.
But what the media fails to highlight is that downer cows are a reality of the dairy industry, the reason why so many vegetarians avoid milk. They will not be slaughtered in California, but they will continued to be exploited to a crippling point. The truth is, there is as much cruelty in a glass of milk as there is in a steak. Besides, veal is a by-product of this unnecessary industry, since humans don’t need to drink milk from another, much larger mammal.
It is for similar reasons that some vegetarians avoid eggs too, but more on that in a later post. Peaceful Praire, a vegan sanctuary in Colorado, recently posted an advert in the Los Angeles Times exposing the terrible suffering endured by dairy cows, including at the so-called organic farms.
So why do cows on dairy farms go down? I’ll pass the word to the website Milksucks:
Corporate-owned factories where cows are warehoused in huge sheds and treated like milk machines have replaced most small family farms. With genetic manipulation and intensive production technologies, it is common for modern dairy cows to produce 100 pounds of milk a day— 10 times more than they would produce in nature. To keep milk production as high as possible, farmers artificially inseminate cows every year. 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. Cows— like all mammals— make milk to feed their own babies— not humans.
And what can you do? Excluding milk from your diet is the best thing you can do. If everyone stops drinking milk, dairy farms will go out of business and no more cows will be bred into life just to spend a miserable their short lives in captivity, having their babies snatched away and then be killed. It’s as simple as that. There are plenty of plant-based milk types, such as soy, rice, almond and oat. Like Nancy Reagan used to say in the 1980, just say no!
