The Modern Cow Consumption Story

The Modern Cow Consumption Story

This morning I was going to a conference in El Paso as I pass by the dairy farms in Mesquite New Mexico my mind started thinking as I looked at the way of how the cows have to live today compared to when I was a kid living around the farms in Kentucky.  I’ve eaten lot of meat all my life and not given it much thought, but lately I have.  I see how the animals are raised a lot different today than when I was a kid.  Cows used to have room to walk around and graze in pastures, eating natural grass as food, they seem happy and contented but that isn’t the case today.

Now the cows are crowded into small pen, no room to hardly walk around, stand knee deep in their own feces’ and their udders almost dragging the ground, a lot of their time is spent laying in their own waste.  Cows today are artificially inseminated and pumped full of drugs to increase milk production.   They have no shelters, they just stand in their pens, through rain, hail, snow, cold, or heat, it doesn’t matter so long as they produce milk for profit.

Every year millions of cows are slaughtered to stock our grocery stores, or supply restaurants and fast food places like MacDonald’s, Burger King, and In-N-Out, Taco Bell, with beef, veal, and dairy products.

As with all mammals, cows produce milk for their babies.  To ensure the highest milk yield possible, U.S. factory farmers artificially inseminate dairy cows every year and keep them pumped full of steroids and other growth hormones.

After they give birth, the mothers are hooked up to machines two or three times a day that takes the very milk intended for their caves.  Did you know after two months, the mothers are once again impregnated and then milked for seven months of their nine-month pregnancies?  The physically taxing cycle of impregnation, birthing, and mechanized milking forces the average dairy cow to become useless or “spent” by her fifth birthday.  However; if a cow is allowed to live naturally, like on the farms as when I was a boy, a cow can live to be 25 years old.

One of the byproducts of the dairy industry is a calf per year per cow.  A calf’s fate depends on his or her gender:  If female, she will likely join her mother on the dairy line.  If it’s a male, he will be sold to beef or veal farmers, often before he is a week old.

The veal industry is thus a direct by product of the dairy industry.  Virtually every calf slaughtered for veal is the child of a cow on the dairy line.  Most of these calves spend their entire lives chained alone inside wooden crates too small for them to even turn around.  To produce the most tender meat, the crates are purposefully designed to prevent movement and cause muscle atrophy.  The urine-soaked wood-slat flooring causes many calves to suffer from chronic pneumonia and other respiratory problems, so veal farmers dose them with large amount of antibiotics.  And because their mothers’ milk is being stolen on the dairy farms, these calves are fed an iron-deficient milk substitute that keeps them anemic and pales the color of their flesh.  After roughly 16 weeks of lonely intensive confinement, without being nursed by their mothers or feeling grass beneath their feet, the calves are slaughtered.

Cattle raised for beef sales are also subjected to cruel treatment.  Without painkillers, they have their testicles ripped out, their horns cut off, and third-degree burns (branding) inflicted on them.  For the first six to ten months of their lives, they are allowed access to the outdoors in the same type pens with no shelters as the dairy cows.  Then their trucked often for hundreds of miles with no food or water, to feedlots where they’ll be fattened on an unnatural diet of grains and “fillers” (which include sawdust and chicken manure).  They’ll stay on the feedlot for another six to ten months until they reach “market weight” of more than 1,000 pounds.  Finally, they’re shipped to slaughter.

Let’s not forget the food given to animals the day before and during transport to slaughterhouses won’t be converted into flesh, so they don’t receive any food or water.  Many animals die on the trucks, some have been found frozen to the metal sides, or overheated, or dehydrated in warm weather.  And at the slaughter houses, they endure painful deaths like pigs and other farmed animals we consume.

I also understand the how and why the above meat consumption is contributing to the high rates of obesity, heart disease, cancer, diabetes, hypertension or other life-threatening conditions are skyrocketing in the United States. 

Nearly 80 percent of all factory-farmed animals receive antibiotics to promote growth and minimize illnesses that are common in intensive confinement animal agribusiness practices.  As a direct result, antibiotic-resistant bacteria strains, such as salmonella and E.coli, are increasingly found in animal products, thus jeopardizing our natural ability of antibiotics to treat infections in humans.  The World Health Organization, and The American Medical Association, and many other health advocates are calling for the reduction or termination of antibiotics usage.

One last thing I would like to mention, the hype about milk is basically an effective marketing campaign by the American Dairy industry.  Our bodies have no natural need for cows’ milk.  In reality we as humans weren’t designed with some odd flaw requiring us to drink the milk of other animals.  Yet humans are the only animals who drink another species’ mother’s milk.  Our bodies treat cows’ milk as an invader, and introducing milk and many other dairy products in our diets is linked to many human health problems.  (I suggest you read “Milk A – Z” by Robert Cohn, July 2001).  Milk is touted for building strong bones, yet a lot of research shows otherwise.  Many long term studies now examine milk consumption in relation to high risk of fractures.  This information is shown consistently that current studies do not show reduction in fractures with high dairy product consumption.  Osteoporosis can be lowered by reducing sodium intake, eating more fruits and vegetables, exercising, and getting calcium from plant foods and vitamin D from sunlight or fortified sources.

Therefore, I’ve decided to make a change for myself, and someday I hope you decide to do the same, no more fast foods and restaurant meat dishes for me.  I know of many researchers and medical expert are coming to the same conclusion: A vegetarian diet will protect your health and even reverse most diseases.  Vegetarian diets offer a number of nutritional benefits, including lower levels of saturated fat, cholesterol, and animal protein as well as higher levels of carbohydrates, fiber, magnesium potassium, folate, and antioxidants such as vitamins C and E and photochemical.  Vegetarians have lower body mass as well as lower rates of death from ischemic heart disease; vegetarians also show lower blood cholesterol levels; lower blood pressure; and lower rates of hypertension, type 2 diabetes, and prostate and colon cancer while strengthening their immune system.  Until the next time I wish you great health and happiness and as always I look forward to your comments or questions.