The High Co$t of Dairy
Carnism’s universal narrative of normal, natural and necessary has maimed most’s perception of cows as mere machines. The false impression of a dull minded herd animal that merely responds to stimuli has invalidated the cognitive and emotional complexities of these animals. With the only intention being to justify the myriad of malicious practices in the commodification of their bodies and their resources. Twelve millennia of domestication and an invasive marketing campaign over the last hundred years have helped to rob these majestic creatures of any identity not only as a species but as individuals as well.
To understand the rise of the dairy industry in America, we must look at the landscape during World War II. Soldiers fighting across the Atlantic were suffering from malnutrition and needed rations with longer shelf lives. To combat this, the government wanted to start utilizing processed dairy production such as evaporated milk but dairy farmers refused to get on board because it was not lucrative to increase production as the demand back home was not there. If “patriotic duty” wasn’t enough then the government needed another way to bolster production. To do so, the government cemented the dairy industry into the very foundation of everyday life through school lunch programs and the rest was history.
Today, the dairy industry thrives off a century of indoctrination and tax-payer subsidies in America. The United States spends an estimated 22 billion dollars per year on dairy subsidies which accounts for 73% of all dairy market gains. Even with consumer demand down, a staggering 98 million metric tons of milk was produced for human consumption in American alone in 2019. This increase is not just an American phenomenon as India leads the world with 60 million dairy cows followed by the European Union which is home to another 23 million dairy cows. These three countries and others all helped to push dairy productions up to 522 million metric tons in 2019. A push propagated into every corner of life to promote the idea of “happy cows” and “strong bones” while animal victimization, a ravage planet and our own jeopardized health are the forgotten side effects written in the finest of fine prints.
All and all the dairy’s persuasion to be perceived as a normal, natural necessity can be declared a success for an industry viewpoint. Common sense seemingly another casualty of carnism when objectively discussing the sentience of another animal who is not us. Conversations in relation to the intelligence and emotional capacities of cows becomes even more perplexing when people fail to recall basic concepts taught in biology class. Some only see cows as milk machines who naturally produce milk for our pleasure. Forgetting that a cow is a mammal and that no mammal just lactates at will but must be impregnated to do so. Like us, a cow carries her young for nine months before giving birth with every intent of using the milk produced to nourish her young. Does this sound familiar? Yet our perversion of these animal’s natural role has allowed for the value of their lives to be based on how they serve us, not based on their intellectual and emotional capacities. The process of commodifying cows or any other living being works to mask the horrors of their endured abuse as well as to protect you from developing any empathy towards their sentience sentenced to suffering.
Contrary to popular belief, cows are fast learners with superb memories demonstrating great success with object discrimination. Which is to say the way a cow differentiate between two objects and mentally groups those objects into different categories. Object discrimination is an excellent indicator of a cow’s mental concept opposed to responding to stimiuli. This ability to discriminate goes well beyond categorizing geometric shapes as a cow can tell whether another cow is familiar or unfamiliar to the herd. More impressively they can recognize a member of their herd just by looking at a two-dimensional photograph. Further evidence even shows that cows have conceptualized their own species as a distinct group separate from any other animal.
A cow’s deep understanding of themselves and the world around them is matched by talents as skilled problem solvers who demonstrate excitement at the completion of a challenge. Cows have the ability to mentally map their surroundings which helps them master the most complicated of mazes through the use of systematic search strategies that can be retained for up to eight hours. When given the opportunity to learn even the most complex mazes in a step-by-step fashion, a cow can recall the appropriate route for six weeks. Cows can even recall visual cues when ensured a food reward for up to one year. Their overall conceptual abilities of object discrimination and spatial navigation dispell any myth that cow’s are dull-minded.
Not only has their intelligence been the victim of smear campaign after smear campaign, their emotional responses are deemed as quite basic. Again much like ourselves, cows are distinct individuals with a complex array of emotions who not only relish in excitement of completing new challenges but who also utilizes cognitive biases based on positive and negative experiences when making decisions. Whether it is the joy of successfully coursing through a maze or being hesitant of a human being that handled them roughly in the past, a cow's emotional responses are anything but basic. With their responses not only being impacted by their own experience but also by the emotional states of other members of their herd as emotions seemingly resonate with one another. Due to their keen sense of smell, a cow can detect the release of the stress induced hormone cortisol in one of their fellow cows. These elevated stress levels can act as an emotional contagion infecting the unstressed cow to behave similar to their stressed counterpart. Just one small part of cow’s interdependence on each other to maintain emotional stability.
Their kinship is further exemplified by their formation of small groups within the herd of two to four cows who will spend a majority of their time together and participate in grooming rituals similaring seen in chimpanzees. Grooming partnerships are a primary component of each other stress levels as cows are extremely sensitive to the touch. Communal living is not only essential for stress relief, a desire for companionship is demonstrated at a young age that will instill the emotional and cognitive abilities of this socialistic herd of individuals as they learn from one another. Even with this innate need for social bonding nurtures the well-being of the cow’s psyche and their great dependency on one another, not all relationships in the herd are equal as cows have been known to hold grudges against one another for up to a year.
Dairy cows in particular are not only great emotional support for each other, they’re fiercer mothers. Mother cows, regardless of individual personalities, all demonstrated protectiveness over their own young. In one study, researchers observed an unfamiliar vehicle moving towards a cow and her calf and in almost every instance, the mother cow moved in between her offspring and the vehicle. The bond between mother and young is no different than it is with human beings and is vital to the welfare of the young calf’s mind. When this bond is cut short, it not only is detrimental to the development of the calf but also elevates the stress of both individuals. The delusion of human’s dairy necessity has prevented a mother from doing the job of providing nourishment to her offspring. A job she does with great knowledge and cares even providing additional sustenance for when a calf is underweight.
Researchers are only starting to grasp the true cognitive and emotional capacities and as more studies become available, we are learning more about how each cow is a unique individual. Cows placed in social isolation did not display similar responses but instead demonstrated different movements and various vocal responses to the stress and fear of being removed from the herd. Regardless of the proof being limited at this time, the evidence unequevolity destroys carnism’s convictions about the value of cows. What we are beginning to realize is the high cost of dairy leaves it’s victims suffering silently shrouded from public view. Wall-to-wall industrial violence churns out maximum yields each year to satisfy your palate pleasure for dairy as the unrelentless death machine pushes forward. The economization of cows from the early Neolithic era to now, from a place of survival to a place of purely profiteering, illuminates the truth about the dairy industry as the gravest example of expansionary exploitation by humans upon another species that has ever existed.
The dairy industry is full of injustice preying on these animals for profit that take its exploitive toll on the bodies of dairy cows. An exhaustive life cycle that cuts most of their lives short by fourth of their natural lifespan of twenty to twenty-five years. In most cases, a dairy cow will spend a majority of her life confined in crowded feedlots forced to move around through excrement while provided little access to a pasture or shelter. In America, 9 out 10 dairy farms are primarily indoor operations with more than half of the cows tethered by the neck to a barn stall. The unsanitary conditions are the beginning of the life charted out for these animals.
For the dairy cows chosen to join the herd, their suffering must last until they are considered spent. Her first months will be in isolation in a calf hutch fed on milk replacer absent of real nourishment and social bonding. She will soon be reunited with the herd and after another year, the remainder of her life will be a constant assault on her body by her captures. An assault that will include a cycle of invasive violence as she is forcibly impregnated against her will over and over again. This act is carried out 80 percent of the time with the use of an Artificial Insemination (AI) gun. The process involves inserting the AI gun into the cow’s vagina while your other arm, gloved and lubricated, forcefully penetrates the cow’s rectum to feel around to ensure the gun is correctly positioned at the cervix. Next, the person grips the cervix while using a rod at the end of the gun and threads it through the cow’s cervix until close enough to the uterus to deposit a sample. Once finished the cows are released and 9-months later, their young come into the world ready to be nourished by their mothers but that’s not the way the story goes for the bovine.
Within hours of birth, calves are stolen away from their mothers causing a traumatic experience for both individuals that can lead to sickness and weight loss from no appetite. Mothers have been known to chase after their kidnapped children and calves have cried so much their throats become raw. Meanwhile, worried mothers unable to comfort their young are hooked up to milking machines mandated to give away their nourishment to you instead of their own young. A demand that leans more on fabrication than consumer confidence has given way to a horrific form of vivisection being carried out on these animals. Extensive biological manipulation of cow’s bodys now has a cow producing twelves times than is required for their young. While good for the dairy industry’s wallet, the long term effect of this Frankensteinian science is the key contributor to their shortened lifespans. The unnatural levels of milk production leads to a high number of mastitis, a painful udder infection which causes swelling, and other issues such as lameness. This theft of her milk will continue for about ten months before the process is restarted again until she is deemed “spent” and will be sold for cheap beef. A fate for 3 million of these battered and abused mothers each year.
In the pursuit of high yields for higher profits, another surplus is also created. With 226 million dairy cows worldwide, a high volume of births will happen each year and for male calves, who serve no purpose to the industry, some will be killed instantly and discharged with others being sold and transported for commercial slaughter. Calves are usually deprived of essentials such as milk and water for prolonged periods of time. The intense circumstance of these long travels are highly stressful for these young animals and most will not lay down for the first 15 hours of their descent into hell. Standing for long periods of time is unnatural for animals of this age and further exacerbates the situation. The magnitude of the stress combined with cramped conditions and extremes in weather can lead to sleep deprivation, post-transport respiratory infections, heat stress and hypothermia. Bruising and injury is also common from handling rough aggression between unfamiliar animals and careless driving. This routine journey across the highways of American everyday will cost more than 21 million calves their lives to fuel the leather, veal, beef and pharmaceutical industries.
These highly intuitive, social yet individualistic beings are subjected to a life of torture. An agony amplified by their acute sense of pain as they are branded and castrated without any pain relief. The industry standard of dehorning has been shown to have lasting traumatic effects even after the pain has subsided. Tail docking is another barbaric practice that the industry claims to be hygienic. The act involves using a sharp object to simply cut off the tail or placing a tight rubber ring around the tail until it falls off. The long term effects of tail docking will be felt during an immensely painful fly season without tail for protection. Whatever the justification for any of the practices from forceful insemination to tail docking, only exists because of your silence.
For as much of the torment executed onto the animals goes unnoticed by most of the general public. The same can be said about the ill-effects on our bodies caused by the consumptions in part to the American government’s continued support of the industry. In the meantime, dairy products have become the number one source of saturated fat contributing to illnesses such as Alzheimer’s Disease and Type 2 Diabetes. The consumption of dairy also increases our risk for prostate and breast cancer. Then add in the cholesterol from dairy products, you have the makings of the key contributors to America’s top killer in Heart Disease. Dairy comes with other risks as well such as tooth decay, kidney disease, irritable bowel syndrome and acne. On top of all these health concerns, worry should be placed on the number of contaminants contained in dairy due to industry practices. Cows are constantly injected with bovine growth hormones to increase production and these hormones have been traced back to dairy products. Besides hormones, both antibiotics and pesticides were prevalent in dairy samples. Things like dioxins and polychlorinated biphenyls, both found in dairy, have been linked to cancer. As the evidence continues to mount against milk doing a body good, at the same time, the industry’s foundational claims of strong bones has been refuted as studies show dairy products to have little to no effect on bone health. False claims of an industry that gets one step closer to bankruptcy every year yet is continuously propped up by booming productions, political affiliations and subsidies.
Dairy is not essential to our continued mortality but it has far graver consequences to the very sustainability of our planet and future generations. Animal agriculture accounts for 25% of our global water footprint contributing a fifth to that total. The average dairy cow requires 5,000 gallons of water per day and in America alones, our 9.4 millions require 47 billion gallons of water. California leads the nations in the number of dairy cows and with the water demanded by the industry to operate, it’s easy to see the impact the industry has had on the droughts that have plagued the state. Not only is dairy demands for water high but the toll it takes on the environment in regards to greenhouse emission and global warming. Cows produce methane which has 100 times more global warming potential than carbon dioxide. The average cow produces 400 litres of methane per day which for the global industry equates to 106 billion litres of methane in a year. Methane is not the only culprit in the dairy industry’s role in global warming as nitrogen is also released by cows having a 300 times more global warming potential of carbon dioxide. The nitrogen along with phosphorus, which are found in manure, which is used for fertilizer, can make its way into waterways after rainfall due to run off.
The toll on animals' lives, the threat to our body and the peril of our planet unfortunately is a distant second to profit margins. Anyone who consumes dairy, whether a vegetarian or not, must understand the ramifications of supporting such an industry comes with these very high costs and someday, the damage done will be irreversible. The dairy industry and their scientific claims to maintain their position are just that, vested interest in their own survival. There is no profit margin in being vegan, the only pursuit we have is restoring the value of life to these beautiful creatures.