I will not go back to drinking milk.
I'll be honest with you, the entire reason I decided to try this vegan thing was Milk. When I watched 'Vegucated' the way in which Dairy Cows work (if you can call it that) was what shocked me the most. Having been veggie since forever, I already knew about the horrendous ways factory animals are bred, reared, farmed and slaughtered but milk had never occurred to me.
Bare with me whilst I go over some very basic points here:
- Cows are mammals.
- Humans are mammals.
- Female mammals (all female mammals) only produce milk when pregnant/having just had a baby.
- In order to produce milk, female cows have to have just had a baby.
Mind. Blown.
It's probably just a sign that I should have paid more attention in my GCSE Biology classes, but I always just thought that cows made milk. That's what they were here for. Cows made milk. They didn't have to have babies to do it. Male or female, cows made milk...
Alright, so it wasn't exactly my brightest moment, but I'd just never thought about it, you know?
So, now that I've (we've) established that all Dairy Cows are females, and that they have to have babies in order to give us that delicious white stuff we put in our drinks or over our cereal, I have a few questions.
Firstly, isn't that a lot of cows getting jiggy?
Well, no, no its not. It's not because these female cows are almost always artificially inseminated with frozen sperm. That's right folks, some male cow has been wanked off (pardon my French, but imagine the job title), have his sperm frozen and then some farmer has to stick their hand up the female cows lady bits and baste her with the male cows frozen junk.
Yum.
Secondly, (and my understanding of biology isn't that bad) pregnant cows = baby cows, right?
Yes, baby cows are a product of us obtaining milk and it's not exactly great news for them.
As mammals, female cows have that same basic instinct to look after and nurture their babies that female humans do. Unlike humans however, mother cows have their babies taken away from the 48 hours after birth. Males are sent off to be reared as either veal or beef and the females are raised to be dairy cows.
Ok, so what about when the mummy cows are too old to be mummies any more?
Usually, they're slaughtered for low grade meat. You know, all that cheap shit the papers bang on and on about? Yup, that stuff.
And how old are the cows when they become Mummies for the first time?
Despite not actually reaching full maturity until the age of 4, many female cows give birth to their first calf at 2. Which is kind of, sort of, horrific. Like when a 13 year old gets up the duff and is on Jezza, but in cow form.
Obviously, a lot of my information is from organisations such as PETA, who only show one side the argument, so I took to the internet and came accross a very interesting website called thisisdairyfarming.com, which is all about dairy farming in the UK. It's a very clean, clear, happy looking website, check it out here, which looks to answer all of your questions on dairy cows, their lives and the milk they produce.
It's good to see that dairy farmers are standing up for themselves, but it also makes me sort of sad. One of the questions the site answers is 'How long do dairy cows live?' and its answer is 'the average lifespan of a dairy cow is six and a half years'.
Makes you think that's quite a long time, doesn't it? But when you consider that a cow who is just left to live it's life as a free animal can live for up to 15 years and that most dairy cows end up succumbing to various infections and diseases (thanks to over milking and cramped conditions) many don't actually live past 4.
I could ramble on, and on, and on about milk for days and weeks and months and years, but I'm really trying to prove that you can live life as a vegan without becoming a bigger preacher than most American Ministers. Instead, I'll leave you with this picture, that says more than this entire (ranty) blog post.
-xo
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