The dairy industry is often portrayed through idyllic images of contented cows grazing freely in lush pastures, producing milk that is essential for human health. However, this narrative is far from reality. The industry employs sophisticated advertising and marketing strategies to paint a rosy picture while hiding the darker truths about its practices. If consumers were fully aware of these hidden aspects, many would likely reconsider their dairy consumption.
In reality, the dairy industry is rife with practices that are not only unethical but also detrimental to animal welfare and human health. From the confinement of cows in cramped indoor spaces to the routine separation of calves from their mothers, the industry’s operations are far removed from the pastoral scenes often depicted in advertisements. Moreover, the industry’s reliance on artificial insemination and the subsequent treatment of both cows and calves reveal a systematic pattern of cruelty and exploitation.
This article aims to uncover eight critical facts about the dairy industry that are often kept from the public eye. These revelations not only highlight the suffering endured by dairy cows but also challenge the commonly held beliefs about the health benefits of dairy products. By shedding light on these hidden truths, we hope to encourage more informed and compassionate choices among consumers.
The dairy industry is one of the worst sectors of the animal exploitation industry. Here are eight facts this industry doesn’t want the public to know.
Commercial industries constantly employ propaganda.
They use advertising and marketing strategies to continually persuade more people to purchase their products, often misleading customers by exaggerating the positives and downplaying the negatives about their products and practices. Some aspects of their industries are so detrimental that they seek to keep them entirely hidden. These tactics are employed because, if customers were fully informed, they would be appalled and likely stop buying these products.
The dairy industry is no exception, and its propaganda machines have created the false image of “happy cows” roaming freely on fields, voluntarily producing the milk that humans “need”. Many people have been falling for this deception. Even many of those better informed, who became awakened to the reality of rearing animals for food and then became vegetarians, believed this lie by not becoming vegans instead and continuing to consume dairy.
Given the dairy industry’s destructive and unethical nature, there are numerous facts it prefers the public not to know. Here are just eight of them.
1. Most dairy cows are kept indoors, not in fields
More cows, bulls and calves than ever are now being kept captive, and more of these animals are spending their entire lives indoors without ever seeing a blade of grass. Cows are nomadic grazers, and their instinct is to wander through and graze on green fields. Even after centuries of domestication, this desire to be outside, eat grass, and move has not been bred out of them. However, in factory farming, dairy cows are kept indoors in cramped spaces, just standing or lying in their own faeces — which they do not like — and they can hardly move. And in the farms that allow the cows to be outside as they consider themselves “high welfare” farms, often they are taken indoors again for months during winter, as they are not adapted to the very cold or hot weather of the places they have been forced to live (a heatwave in Kansas at the beginning of June 2022 caused the premature death of thousands of cows and bulls). Inhumane treatment by factory farm workers is common, as most of those working in the industry consider animals as disposable commodities with no feelings.
The Sentience Institute estimated that 99% of farmed animals in the US were living on factory farms in 2019, which included 70.4% of cows farmed. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), in 2021 there were approximately 1.5 billion cows and bulls in the world, most of them in intensive farming. In these euphemistically called intensive “Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations” (CAFOs), hundreds (in the US, at least 700 to qualify) or thousands of dairy cows are kept together and forced into a “production line” that has become increasingly mechanised and automated. This involved being fed unnatural food for cows (mostly grains which consist of corn by-products, barley, alfalfa and cottonseed meal, supplemented with vitamins, antibiotics, and hormones), being kept indoors (sometimes for their entire life), being milked with machines, and being killed in high-speed slaughterhouses.
2. Commercial dairy farms are cruel pregnancy factories
One of the aspects of milk production that seems to be most misunderstood by the general population with little knowledge of farming is the mistaken belief that cows have been somehow bred to spontaneously produce milk — as if they were like apple trees that spontaneously grow apples. This cannot be further from the truth. Mammals only produce milk after giving birth, so for cows to produce milk, they have to be giving birth constantly. They are often forced to be pregnant again when they would be still producing milk for their previous calf. Despite all technological advances, no cow has been genetically modified or manipulated in such a way that it does not need to be pregnant and give birth to produce milk. So, a dairy farm is a cow pregnancy and birth factory.
By the use of hormones (Bovine somatotropin is used to increase milk production in dairy cows), removing the calves sooner, and inseminating the cows when they are still producing milk — which is a very unnatural situation — the body of the cow is under pressure to use many resources at the same time, so they become “spent” sooner, and are disposed of when they are still young. They will then be executed en masse in slaughterhouses, often having their throats cut, or with a bolt shot in the head. There, they will all line up to their demise, likely feeling terrified because of hearing, seeing, or smelling other cows being killed before them. Those final horrors of the lives of dairy cows are the same for those bred in the worse factory farms and those bred in the organic “high welfare” grass-fed regenerative grazing farms — they both end up being transported against their will and killed in the same slaughterhouses when they are still young.
Killing cows is part of the dairy pregnancy factories’ work, as the industry will kill them all once they are not productive enough, as it costs money to keep them alive, and they need younger cows to produce more milk. In factory farming, cows are killed much younger than in traditional farms, after just four or five years (they could live up to 20 years if they are removed from farms), because their lives are much harder and more stressful, so their milk production decreases more quickly. In the US, 33.7 million cows and bulls were slaughtered in 2019. In the EU, 10.5 million cows were slaughtered in 2022. According to Faunalytics, a total of 293.2 million cows and bulls were slaughtered in 2020 in the world.
3. The dairy industry sexually abuses millions of animals
When humans began controlling the breeding of cows, which created the multiple breeds of domestic cows we see today, this caused a lot of suffering. Firstly, by preventing cows and bulls from choosing the mates they liked and forcing them to mate with each other even if they did not want to. Therefore, early forms of farming cows already had elements of reproduction abuse that would become sexual abuse later. Secondly, forcing the cows to be pregnant more often, stressing their bodies more, and ageing sooner.
With industrial farming, the reproductive abuse that traditional farming started has become sexual abuse, as cows are now inseminated artificially by a person who took the sperm of a bull also obtained by sexual abuse (often using electrical shocks to extract semen in a process called electroejaculation). Beginning when they are around 14 months old, dairy cows now are artificially impregnated and kept on a constant cycle of birth, milking, and more inseminations, until they are killed when they are 4 to 6 years old — when their bodies begin to break down from all the abuse.
Dairy farmers typically impregnate cows every year using a device that the industry itself calls a “rape rack”, as the action performed in them constitutes a sexual assault on the cows. To impregnate the cows, farmers or vets jam their arms far into the cow’s rectum to locate and position the uterus and then force an instrument into her vagina to impregnate her with the sperm previously collected from a bull. The rack prevents the cow from defending herself from this violation of her reproductive integrity.
4. The dairy industry steals babies from their mothers
The first thing that humans did to cows about 10,500 years ago when they started domesticating them was abduct their calves. They realised that if they separated the calves from their mothers, they could then steal the milk the mother was producing for their calves. That was the first act of cow farming, and that was when the suffering began — and has continued since.
As the mothers had very strong maternal instincts, and the calves were imprinted with their mothers as their survival would depend on sticking to them all the time while they were moving through fields so they could suckle, separating the calves from their mothers was a very cruel act that started then and has continued today.
Removing the calves from their mothers also caused the calves to experience hunger as they need their mother’s milk. Even in places like India, where cows are sacred among Hindus, farmed cows suffer in this way, even if kept in the fields left to their own devices most of the time.
Because technology has not found a method of forcing the cows to produce milk without getting pregnant every few months, the separation anxiety caused by separating mothers from calves still happens in dairy factory farms, but now at a much bigger scale, not just in terms of the number of cows involved and the number of times it happens per cow but also because of the reduction of time the calves are allowed to be with their mother after birth (normally less than 24 hours).
5. The dairy industry abuses and kills babies
Male calves in dairy factory farms are killed soon after birth, as they will be unable to produce milk when they grow up. However, now, they are killed in much higher numbers because technology has also been unable to reduce the proportion of male calves born, so 50% of the pregnancies needed to keep the cows producing milk will end up with male calves being born and killed soon after birth, or a few weeks later. The UK Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board (AHDB) estimates that of the almost 400,000 male calves born on dairy farms each year, 60,000 are killed on-farm within a few days of birth. It is estimated that the number of calves slaughtered in the US in 2019 was 579,000, and that number has been increasing since 2015.
The calves from dairy factory farms suffer much more now as there are many who, instead of being shot dead straight away, are moved to huge “veal farms”, where they are kept in isolation for weeks. There, they are fed artificial milk deficient in iron which makes them anaemic and changes their mussels to become more “palatable” to people. In these farms, they are often kept in fields very exposed to the elements — which, because they are deprived of the warmth and protection of their mothers, is another act of cruelty. The veal crates where they are often kept are small plastic huts, each with a fenced-in area not much bigger than the calf’s body. This is because, if they could run and jump — as they would do if they were free calves —they would develop tougher muscles, which is not what people who eat them like. In the US, after 16 to 18 weeks of missing their mothers in these farms, they are then killed and their flesh sold to veal eaters (in the UK a bit later, from six to eight months).
6. The dairy industry causes unhealthy addiction
Casein is a protein found in milk that gives it its white colour. According to the University of Illinois Extension Program, caseins make up 80% of the proteins in cow milk. This protein is responsible for causing addiction in baby mammals of any species making them seek their mother so they can be breastfed regularly. It’s a natural “drug” that evolved to guarantee that baby mammals, who often can walk soon after birth, stay close to their mothers, always seeking their milk.
The way this works is by casein releasing opiates called casomorphins as it is digested, which can signal comfort to the brain indirectly via hormones, becoming the source of addiction. Several studies have shown that casomorphins lock with opioid receptors, which are linked with the control of pain, reward, and addiction in the brain of mammals.
However, this dairy drug affects humans too, even when they drink milk from other mammals. If you keep feeding humans milk in their adulthood (milk is meant for babies, not adults) but now concentrated in the form of cheese, yoghurt, or cream, with higher doses of concentrated casein, this may create dairy addicts.
A 2015 study by the University of Michigan revealed that animal cheese triggers the same part of the brain as drugs. Dr. Neal Barnard, founder of the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, said in The Vegetarian Times, “Casomorphins attach to the brain’s opiate receptors to cause a calming effect in much the same way heroin and morphine do. In fact, since cheese is processed to express out all the liquid, it’s an incredibly concentrated source of casomorphins, you might call it ‘dairy crack.’”
Once you are addicted to dairy, it is easy to begin rationalising the consumption of other animal products. Many dairy addicts allow themselves to exploit birds by consuming their eggs, and then exploit bees by consuming their honey. This explains why many vegetarians have not transitioned to veganism yet, as their addiction to dairy is clouding their judgements and has forced them to ignore the plight of other farmed animals under the illusion that they will suffer less than those animals bred for meat.
7. Cheese is not a health product
Cheese does not contain any fibre or phytonutrients, characteristic of healthy food, but animal cheese contains cholesterol, often in high quantities, which is a fat that increases the risk of several diseases when consumed by humans (only animal products contain cholesterol). A cup of animal-based cheddar cheese contains 131 mg of cholesterol, Swiss cheese 123 mg, American cheese spread 77mg, Mozzarella 88 mg, and parmesan 86 mg. According to the National Cancer Institute in the US, cheese is the top food source of cholesterol-raising fat in the American diet.
Cheese is often high in saturated fat (up to 25 grams per cup) and salt, making it an unhealthy food if eaten regularly. This means eating too much animal cheese could lead to high cholesterol in the blood and high blood pressure, increasing people’s risk of cardiovascular disease (CVD). This can outweigh any potential benefits in terms of cheese being a source of calcium, vitamin A, Vitamin B12, zinc, phosphorus, and riboflavin (all of which can be obtained from plant, fungus, and bacterial sources), especially for overweight people or people already at risk of CVD. Additionally, cheese is a calorie-dense food, so eating too much may lead to obesity, and as it is addictive, people find it difficult to eat it in moderation.
Soft cheeses and blue-veined cheeses can sometimes become contaminated with listeria, especially if they are made with unpasteurized or “raw” milk. In 2017, two people died and six were hospitalised after contracting listeriosis from Vulto Creamery cheeses. Later, 10 other cheese companies recalled products over concerns of listeria contamination.
Many people in the world, especially of African and Asian origin, suffer from lactose intolerance, so consuming cheese and other dairy products is particularly unhealthy for them. An estimated 95% of Asian Americans, 60% to 80% of African Americans and Ashkenazi Jews, 80% to 100% of Native Americans, and 50% to 80% of Hispanics in the US, suffer from lactose intolerance.
8. If you drink animal milk, you are swallowing pus
The US Department of Agriculture says that mastitis, a painful inflammation of the udder, is one of the leading causes of death for adult cows in the dairy industry. There are about 150 bacteria that can cause the disease.
In mammals, white blood cells are produced to combat infection, and sometimes they are shed outside the body in what is known as “pus”. In cows, white blood cells and skin cells are normally shed from the lining of the udder into the milk, so pus from the infection drips into the cow’s milk.
To quantify the amount of pus, the somatic cell count (SCC) is measured (high amounts would indicate an infection). The SCC of healthy milk is below 100,000 cells per millilitre, but the dairy industry is allowed to combine milk from all the cows in a herd to arrive at a “bulk tank” somatic cell count (BTSCC). The current regulatory limit for somatic cells in milk in the US defined in the Grade “A” Pasteurized Milk Ordinance is 750,000 cells per millilitre (mL), so people are consuming milk with pus from infected cows.
The EU permits the consumption of milk with up to 400,000 somatic pus cells per millilitre. Milk with a somatic cell count of more than 400,000 is deemed unfit for human consumption by the European Union but accepted in the US and other countries. In the UK, no longer in the EU, a third of all dairy cows have mastitis each year., and the average levels of pus in milk are around 200,000 SCC cells per millilitre.
Don’t be fooled by abusive animal exploiters and their horrible secrets.
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Notice: This content was initially published on VeganFTA.com and may not necessarily reflect the views of the Humane Foundation.
