Veganist_ Lose Weight, Get Healthy, Change the World - Kathy Freston [69]
After giving two years of their lives to produce eggs for the company, the hens were rewarded with a brutal death. Sent off to a rendering plant and then combined with cornmeal, the hens’ bodies became an ingredient for chicken feed.
And this is what happens to dairy cows…
In December 2008, I was hired as a maintenance worker at a large dairy farm. During the six weeks I worked there, I witnessed animal abuse on a massive scale. Although there were many instances of sadistic workers hitting cows for fun, or unnecessarily using electric prods, most abuse was institutional in nature, done not for pleasure but for profit. On this mega dairy farm, over 7,000 cows live in overcrowded, highly unsanitary conditions. They are mutilated, drugged, neglected, left to endure a variety of painful illnesses, and emotionally traumatized by forced separation from their young. The realities of industrial dairy farming are a well-kept secret, nothing like the idyllic dairy farms seen on milk cartons and television ads. During the course of my employment, I encountered thousands of animals that bore the cost of this deception. These are a few of their stories.
It’s my second day on the job, and I’m repairing a broken gate in the birthing area, a remote corner of a huge barn where expecting cows are brought to deliver their young. Number 70426, a four-year-old Holstein cow, has just begun to give birth. A worker arrives carrying an archaic-looking metal device that he clamps between the mother cow’s nostrils, tethering her in place. He then walks behind her and wraps a steel chain around the emerging forelegs of the birthing calf, putting all of his weight into yanking it out.
The calf falls to the ground with a thud and lies startled on the barren concrete floor. She has a distinctive look, all white except for prominent black markings around her eyes and another at the base of her tail. Her wide, doe-eyes survey her surroundings for the first time before settling on her mom.
Once the worker releases 70426, she makes a beeline directly to her newborn calf, contentedly comforting her with gentle licks. This heartwarming scene is interrupted after only mere minutes, when the worker returns, abruptly grabs the calf and begins to drag her away by one hind leg.
Number 70426 runs behind her calf as they each bellow in distress. When the calf is dragged behind a locked gate, her mother presses her body against the gate and cries out, filling the barn with a sound reminiscent of a tornado siren. But the gate doesn’t budge. This is the last time she will ever see her calf, and I feel like she realizes it.
Numbr 70426 continues to call for her baby throughout the afternoon. When she notices me watching, she begins alternating her attention between the gate and me, bellowing with increased urgency. I have to wonder if she is just afraid, or if she is actually pleading for my help. I know that she goes through this every year, but by the looks of her, it never gets easier.
Most calves born on this farm are unwanted by the industry and sent to slaughter when they are only a few days old; however, some females are raised to take their mothers’ places. 70426’s calf, issued the number 21562, is about to begin a life of intensive milk production.
When she is only weeks old, 21562’s horns and tail are amputated. No anesthesia is used. I watch as she is muzzled and tied to a post with the same halter rope used on her mother a month earlier. Using a hot iron scoop, a barn worker begins a process called “disbudding,” literally digging the formative horn buds out of her skull. I’ll never forget the sight of the smoke billowing from the calf’s head as the hot iron met her skin, coupled with the sizzling sound and smell of seared tissue.
“It’s incredibly f***ing painful,” is how my supervisor explains the process to me. As the worker burns into her skull with the device, 21562 attempts to buck, cries out and tries to escape, but in her ad hoc restraints, she can only produce