Dairy Cruelty

Revelation of cruelty practised in the dairy industry

At least half of the 10 million cows kept for milk in the United States live on factory farms in conditions that cause tremendous suffering to the animals. They live crowded into concrete-floored milking pens or barns, where they are milked two or three times a day by machines.

Milking machines enable a single farm worker to milk 86 cows in two hours.

Milking machines often cause cuts and injuries, and in some cases give cows repeated shocks.

A single farm can lose several hundred cows to uncontrolled electric shocking.

To keep the animals at high levels of productivity, dairy farmers keep them pregnant constantly through artificial insemination.

Growth hormones and unnatural milking schedules cause dairy cows' udders to become painful and so heavy they sometimes drag on the ground.

Approximately half of the country's dairy cows suffer from mastitis, a bacterial infection of their udders.

A full udder can weigh 60 pounds and hold 50 pounds of milk.

With genetic manipulation and intensive production technologies, it is common for modern dairy cows to produce 100 pounds of milk a day- ten times more than they would produce in nature.

Bovine Growth hormone can cause birth defects in calves.

When a milk producing cow's production wanes, she is sent to slaughter. In nature, cows live 20-25 years, but a typical factory-farmed cow is used up in three or four years. Then she is sent off to the slaughterhouse most likely to be ground up into hamburger.

Dairy cows' calves are torn away within hours of birth, so that the milk can be consumed by humans.

Male calves, the 'byproducts' of the dairy industry, endure 14-17 weeks of torment in veal crates so small they can't even turn around, stretch their legs, or lie down comfortably. (One million calves are used for veal in the U.S. each year.

Female calves are often kept in tiny crates or tethered in stall for the first few months before becoming milk machines.