Veganist_ Lose Weight, Get Healthy, Change the World - Kathy Freston [70]
Unfazed, the worker grabs her tail, yanks her back up, and callously digs his thumb and forefinger into her eye sockets, painfully restricting her motion even further, as he resumes his work.
When the horns are fully burned away, she is then “tail docked.” The worker uses a steel clamp to remove a portion of 21562’s tail, slicing through her skin, bone, and nerve endings as she kicks and continues to bellow in distress. When she is finally released from the muzzle, saliva pours from her mouth.
Disbudding is an almost universal mutilation carried out on calves raised in intensive confinement on dairy factory farms. When she matures, 21562 will spend every day in a crowded indoor pen, backed up against hundreds of other cows, each vying for space in this narrow, concrete enclosure. The pens are never properly cleaned, forcing her to live in her own bacteria-laden manure. She will only leave this space when she is herded to the milking parlor, milked for five minutes by an automated machine, and returned to her pen. Unlike the pastoral images stamped on the products in which her milk will be sold, 21562 will never graze outside, and will be deprived of access to sunshine, open space, fresh air, and a normal diet.
Cows at this facility are expected to produce upwards of 80 pounds of milk each day—more than five times what they produce naturally. Milk production is bolstered by a foreign diet of grain, longer hours of artificial light, and the routine use of antibiotics, steroids, and the controversial growth hormone rBST. Above all, her milk production is manipulated through repeated impregnation.
My supervisor explained that when a cow begins to produce less than 65 pounds of milk a day, she is “freshened,” meaning artificially inseminated to restimulate lactation, typically as soon as two months after her most recent calving. Such an intensive breeding regimen coupled with overmilking is known to cause malnutrition, mastitis (a painful udder inflammation that increases pus levels in milk), abomasal displacement (stomach distention), leg spraddling (crippling), and uterine prolapses (inversion of the uterus, which reduces blood flow and causes decay). Each of these painful afflictions was common at this facility.
Number 46570 endured a lifetime under these conditions before succumbing to a crippling joint infection. She developed a bad sore where her back leg repeatedly chafed on her concrete “bed.” The open wound became impacted with manure until it swelled to the size of a softball, visibly dripping pus from a deep abscess in the center. When her condition had fully deteriorated, she was brought to a section of the farm designated for “downers,” cows too sick or injured to support their own weight.
I checked on 46570 a week later and was dismayed, if not surprised, to learn that she still hadn’t received any meaningful veterinary care. Her cloudy eyes were flared open with an intense look I had seen many times before—an expression of unimaginable suffering. Her right foreleg spasmed involuntarily, and as she breathed in short, heavy bursts, I could hear the crunching noise of her grinding jaw.
Another week went by and she still lay in the same place. By now, she had become extremely thin, far too weak to even lift her head to drink. I sought out the facility’s only veterinarian, who insisted that she might still get up if given time.
Although this rationalization was beyond unlikely—downed cows almost never get up after three days—there may have been another reason for prolonging her suffering. Recent legislation banned the sale of downers for human consumption, but not for use in animal by-products. I learned that this loophole means there’s a the financial incentive for dairy facilities to withhold humane euthanasia until a downer can be sold to a rendering facility, which will process her into the raw ingredients of products like soap and dog food.
Respite finally came during the third week, and sure enough, it was in the form of a rendering