The High Price of Milk To a dairy cow, the difference between life on a traditional or organic farm and life in the factory farms that dominate agriculture today must be like the difference between Walden Pond and Auschwitz.
Instead of grazing outdoors every day on fresh grass or straw, she spends most of her time confined or tied in a small stall in a crowded, noisy barn. Her unnatural diet is optimized to turn her into a cost-efficient milk delivery system. Instead of bearing calves every two or three years, she is artificially inseminated to calve about once a year so the tap can flow almost nonstop. She is milked not by hand but by rough, failure-prone machinery. Her huge, swollen udders are often infected and probably a source of chronic pain. Her horns are usually removed by cutting, scooping, or gouging.
No sooner does the dairy cow give birth than the calf is snatched away, usually within 24 hours. Fed a cheap milk substitute, the calf will follow in her mother's footsteps or (if male) become a breeding bull, join a beef herd, be slaughtered immediately as "bob veal," or endure a short, Dickensian existence chained by the neck in a dark wooden crate less than 2 feet by 4. There the calf will be fed an iron-free milk substitute to produce the anemic baby flesh that is veal.
Finally, "at sixteen weeks of age," writes Erik Marcus in Vegan: The New Ethics of Eating, "the veal calf. . . .takes the first steps outside his crate since the day he was born – as the producer leads him onto a truck bound for the slaughterhouse."
Usually by the age of four or five, the calf's mother's milking days are over. Still a young woman in cow years, she is crowded into a cattle car and driven to her slaughter. You could call it a mercy killing were it not for the fact that:
In the dairy belt of Southern Ontario, John Pronk has for the past 15 years owned and operated one of the province's 13 certified organic dairy farms. Pronk, a naturopathic doctor, is also an inspector of organic farms.She may die from trampling, exposure, or dehydration on a long trip to the stockyard or slaughterhouse. She may arrive so sick and weak that she can't make it off the truck. If shouting and beating don't work, she will be chained and dragged off, because as long as she has the breath of life in her she can be slaughtered for human consumption. Inadequately stunned before being strung up for slaughter, she may be bled and dismembered while still conscious. "I've seen thousands and thousands of cows go through the slaughter process alive. . . .I've been in the side-puller where they're still alive. All the hide is stripped out down the neck there." (From a sworn affadavit last year by one of 17 workers at the IBP meat packing plant in Wallula, Washington. IBP is the world's largest meat-packing company.) Pronk is proud that on farms like his cows aren't pushed to be productive. "On our farm," says Pronk, "I would say the average animal is producing for about 10 years."
And during that time, the cows get to graze outdoors on grass in the summer, eat certified-organic feed all year round, and live in pleasant surroundings.
It sounds like a good life.
But when Pronk's cows can no longer bring home the bacon, the certified organic love-in comes to an end.
"When an animal goes off of our farm," says Pronk, "it's typically sold at the stockyards to another farm" – a farm willing to squeeze the last drops of milk out of it, Pronk explains. As for the other cows, "sometimes they're sold as slaughter meat, and then it often goes to a fast food restaurant or something like that."
What about the calves?
The females get to stay, and good bull calves also remain as breeders or are sold to breed on other farms. "But most of our bull calves are sold to a conventional market that will either raise them as veal or as steers," says Pronk.
Pronk knows of no farms anywhere that let unproductive cows live out their natural 20- to 25-year lifespan or that spare calves from the veal crates. (I've since learned that in response to consumer demand, a very small number of farms now do raise veal calves humanely.)
"I guess that would be the ideal system," Pronk says. But given how much more costly it would be, he doubts consumers would go for it.
VERDICT: Humane societies, including Winnipeg's, are certifying products from farms where animals are treated with certain minimal standards of compassion. But humane practices that would hike prices more than five or ten percent are not in high demand. "Humane labelled," "Freedom Food," and other seals of approval are a step in the right direction. But they continue to mask a heavy toll of animal suffering.
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