Guest Author - Samantha Black

The sun beats down steadily on a once beautiful Holstein cow. There’s a large oak tree not more than ten feet away offering shade… but she’ll never reach it. She’s crippled. Both back legs are twisted and broken and swollen three times their normal size.

She has been lying there for days with no food or water. She is not alone. There are other cows in the "downer chute" with her. Some are dead and some, near death. The flies are persistent. Her frail body is just skin stretched over bones. The gentle rise and fall of her thin ribs is the only indication she is still alive.

A stockyard worker arrives and wraps a chain around her right hind leg. He hooks the other end to a winch on the tractor. As the chain draws taut, she lets out a faint moan. You can hear the ligaments in her leg popping and tearing as she is dragged in agony to the slaughterhouse killing floor.

Four years earlier, she was an innocent, fluffy little baby looking at the world for the first time. She was loved and lulled to sleep by the caresses of her mother's gentle tongue. As a strong and healthy baby girl, it is decided she’ll join the other females at the production line.

As she slept peacefully in the morning sunshine, her mother grazed a few feet away. The farmer came, threw a rope around her small neck and pulled it tight. He grabbed her tender tail and twisted it painfully up over her back to get her to move. She cried out, but no one came to rescue her. He dragged her to a noisy pen filled with other young calves and shoved her inside. The pen was dry and dusty, her eyes itched and her throat ached as she called frantically to her mother. But she would never see her mother again.

Eighteen months later, she was artificially inseminated and seven months after that she gave birth to her first calf, a boy. His fate was sealed by his sex. He was sold at an auction a few days later. He is shut up in a wooden crate measuring just 22" x 54", a space smaller than the trunk of the average compact car. His heart aches, he's lonely and he cries for his mother. He's weak and sick with the “scours” (chronic diarrhea), a common ailment among veal calves. He's found dead in his crate one morning, mired in his own waste.

Back at the dairy farm, the young mother cries out for her lost baby. Her body continues to produce milk for him, but it's taken by a machine. She's never permitted outside to graze. She doesn't see the sun or breathe fresh air. As one of the millions of cows raised on factory farms, she lives 24 hours a day 7 days a week inside a "tie stall", chained around the neck. This is the extent of her world.

She's injected with genetically engineered growth hormones that revs up her system to produce three or four times the amount of milk she would naturally produce to feed her baby. Her udders swell painfully between milkings. Her bag is so distended sometimes it drags on the ground, where she can't avoid stepping on it.

The farmer wants a steady flow of milk from her, so she is artificially inseminated every 10 months, and every year her new baby is ripped away from her. Being constantly pregnant and forced to produce unnatural quantities of milk year after year, her body begins to shut down. She develops ketosis, a disease that causes her body to break down its own tissue in order to produce milk. Tired and weak, she begins to lose weight, and her final artificial insemination fails to produce a calf.

She is sent to auction.

As she struggles to maintain her footing on the crowded and bumpy ride to the stockyard, she catches a fleeting glimpse through the slats of the truck of grassy fields and sunshine, and she sniffs hungrily at the fresh air. It fills her nostrils as she feels herself slipping and falling down.

This is the hidden cost behind our addiction to milk and cheese. Please consider going vegan. Write to me (use the contact form below) and I'll send you a list of great dairy substitutes.