My new
book, Vegetarian to Vegan, is going
through the publishing process now. I
thought I might give you all a taste of some of the information in the book by blogging
excerpts from it over the next several weeks.
I wrote
Vegetarian to Vegan because while
many authors have written very compelling books about the horrors of
slaughterhouses, how smart cows, pigs and chickens are, and how bad meat and
dairy are for both our health and our environment, no one has ever focused in-depth
on the health, animal rights and environmental issues of just the dairy and egg
industries – the two industries that vegetarians support, but vegans do
not. And it turns out that there is a
lot you might want to know.
For
example, when I began researching dairy cows, I found that they suffer from
very high rates of Johne’s disease, mastitis, bovine leukemia, milk fever and
other adverse effects that happen occur in dairy cows, but not usually in beef
cows. Similarly, I found statistics in
medical journals about eggs, such as that the Physician’s Health Study found
that there was a 23% increase in the risk of death in people who ate just one
egg a day.[1] In fact, there was a
lot of information that I had never come across about the diary and egg
industries when I really started diving deep into veterinarian journals,
medical journals and environmental reports.
Here is
an excerpt from the section on dairy cows and their calves, and what happens
when a calf is born and separated from it’s mother…
Separation
On a factory farm, cow’s milk is not
intended for baby cows – it’s intended for humans. Therefore, baby calves are not allowed to
nurse. They are taken from their mothers
as soon as two hours after birth, and are either fed a commercial milk replacer
that is made from dried milk powder, or they are fed milk that has been deemed
unfit for human consumption.
Besides keeping the milk for humans to
consume, there is another reason why baby calves are taken from their mothers
so quickly: According to the Journal of
Dairy Science, “Calves left with cows for more than 2 hours [of birth] had a
higher risk for infection, possibly due to exposure to large amounts of
infectious agents in the maternity pen.”[2] Letting the calf stay with its mother for any
significant period of time increases risk for Cryptosporidium infection[3]
and respiratory disease, which increases calves’ risk of death by six times.[4] Basically, these authors are saying that the
“maternity wards” at the dairy factories are so filthy that the calves’ lives
are at risk if they hang around for more than a couple of hours.
Sadly, just like human mothers bond
tightly with their newborn babies, so do cows bond with their calves. Mother cows have been reported to bellow for
many hours or even days after her calf is taken from her. Author Oliver Sacks, MD discusses a visit
that he and Temple Grandin made to a dairy farm: When they arrived, they heard
many cows bellowing, causing a very loud and unnerving sound. Temple commented, “They must have separated
the calves from the cows this morning,” and indeed, that was exactly the case.[5] Similarly, John Avizienius, a senior
scientific officer at the Farm Animal Department at the RSPCA in Britain,
discusses one particular cow that suffered great emotional distress over the
separation from her calf: She bellowed
for hours, and even after six weeks would hover at the pen door where she had
last seen her calf.[6]
In a cruel twist of fate, it’s been
shown in mammals that multiparous females (those giving birth for the second
time or more) have higher levels of oxytocin than primiparous females (those
giving birth for the first time.)[7] This means that with each subsequent birth, a
mother cow presumably grows more and more bonded to her calves, and it likely
becomes more and more emotionally traumatizing for the cow each time a baby
calf is taken from her.
Just as the mother forms an immediate
bond with her calf, the newborn calf also has an immediate attachment to his or
her mother, and is healthier the longer it gets to bond with its mother. Calves
allowed to remain with their mothers for up to 14 days showed weight gains at
three times the rate of calves taken within 1-2 days, and they also showed
signs of better searching behaviors and better social relationships with other
calves.[8] But as we’ve seen, baby calves are taken away
within hours due to both the risk of infection from their filthy conditions, as
well as the desire for the farmers to keep the mother’s milk for humans – not
calves – so they can make a profit.
It has been shown that baby calves
experience emotional distress when they are separated from their mothers. Unbelievably, they have been known to try to
bond with the factory farm workers, even trying to suckle the fingers of the
worker who is sending them off to slaughter.
Female calves will be raised to become
dairy cows like their mothers, and the male calves will go to veal farms where
they will be slaughtered for their tender meat.
[1] Djousse L, Gaziano
JM. Egg consumption in relation to
cardiovascular disease and mortality: the Physicians' Health Study. Am J
Clin Nutr 2008;87:964-969.
[2] Gulliksen, S.M., et al.
(2009) Calf mortality in
Norwegian dairy herds. J Dairy Sci, 92,
2782-2795.
[3] Faubert, G.M. & Litvinsky, Y.
(2000) Ntaural transmission of
Cryptosporidium parvum between dams and calves on a dairy farm. J Parasitol, 86, 495-500
[4] Gulliksen, S.M., et al.
(2009) Calf mortality in
Norwegian dairy herds. J Dairy Sci, 92,
2782-2795.
[5]
Dasa,
S. Cows are Cool. Soul Science University Press, 2009. Pg 38.
[6] Dasa, S. Cows are
Cool. Soul Science University Press,
2009. Pg 39.
[7] Levy, F., K. M. Kendrick, J. A. Goode, R. Guevara-Guzman and E. B.
Keverne. 1995. Oxytocin and vasopressin release in the olfactory bulb of
parturient ewes: Changes with maternal experience and effects on acetylcholine,
gamma-aminobutyric acid, glutamate and noradrenaline release. Brain Res.
669(2):197-206.
[8] Flower FC, Weary DM - Institute of Ecology and Resource
Management, School of Agriculture, Edinburgh, UK. "Effects of early separation on
the dairy cow and calf: 2. Separation at 1 day and 2 weeks after birth.".
Retrieved 2009-05-29.
No comments:
Post a Comment