Milk is Murder: The Dairy Industry

 

I recently listened to a Rich Roll podcast with Gene Baur (episode 35). If you've never heard of Rich's podcasts I highly recommend you to do so, they're amazing (I'm planning on dedicating a post to Rich). Gene Baur is president and co-founder of Farm Sanctuary, started in 1986 it's the first animal rescue organisation dedicated to farmed animals. Gene seems like a real down to earth guy, and I'm sure you'll enjoy the podcast if you wish to listen (see below).

 

 So want to know how milk gets on our shelves? Here's the truth.

 

Just like a human, cows don't lactate for the heck of it, they lactate to feed their new born babies. Once the baby calf is born within hours it's taken away from the mother so that she can produce milk for humans to drink. Sound messed up? It is, and it does stop there. The cows are then hooked up to a milk machine 2 to 3 times a day and pushed to produce 10 times more milk than they would normally do in nature. This obviously puts an immense amount of stress on the cow. In a healthy environment a cow can live up to 20 years, compared to a modern dairy where they live to 3 to 4 years, less than a quarter of their potential. Many cows can are pushed that hard to produce milk unnaturally the can't stand, these are called downed animals. At this point they're then slaughtered and become your beef.

 

What happens to the baby calves?

 

If a calf is female, they take the path of their mother by becoming milking cows. If male, they become veal. The veal industry was born out of the dairy industry. These male calves typically only live up to 20 weeks before slaughtering, and are kept in pretty horrific conditions. Many are feed a diet deficient in iron and fibre so they're borderline anaemic, their flesh becomes pale in colour to be sold as milk fed veal.

 

Extremely ugly industry. Next time you're at the store why not try the wide variety of non-dairy milks available; rice, almond, hemp, soy, just to name a few are all excellent alternatives. Much healthier and guilt free.