PROTECT COWS AND THEIR CALVES

Each cow will be repeatedly impregnated year after year, carrying each baby for nine months.

Once born, she and her calf will be forcibly separated, usually spending just hours or days together. The milk is then taken, bottled and sold for human consumption.

Female calves follow in their mothers’ footsteps, while males are swiftly killed for their flesh or enter the cruel veal industry.

After giving birth over and again until her body becomes weak and her milk production declines, cows used for their dairy all suffer the same fate. After a few short years, they are sent to slaughter, destined to become cheap beef.

Because they cannot produce milk, male calves are considered useless to the dairy industry. For this reason, many are killed shortly after birth.

A 2020 report revealed that an estimated 60,000 male calves each year in the UK were shot on-farm. Though this practice is now being phased out in many farms as a result of new rules from major supermarkets and assurance schemes, the ultimate fate of male calves has not changed.

Many will be sent to the slaughterhouse at just weeks old, or raised for a short time before being killed and sold as veal or beef.

Cows in the dairy industry are bred specifically to produce far larger quantities of milk than they would ever produce naturally. This unnatural milk production, combined with repeated forced pregnancies, takes a toll on their bodies.

By the time they are a few years old, they are seen as ‘unproductive’ – because they’re so exhausted and their milk production has declined – and no longer profitable to the industry.

At this point they are sent to slaughter and sold for cheap meat and leather products.

Male calves are not the only babies to be killed by the dairy industry, as some calves are killed while they are still in their mother’s womb.

An estimated 150,000 cows are killed every year in the UK while they are carrying their babies. Shockingly, many of them are in the last stage of their pregnancies, meaning their calves can suffer during and for a few minutes after the slaughter.

Approximately 90% of the pregnant cows that are slaughtered every year are cows bred for their milk.

Because the industry is constantly looking for ways to increase profits, a new system – referred to as ‘zero-graze’ – has been introduced in the UK and it is being used more and more frequently.

In a zero-graze system, a cow is not allowed to graze or be outdoors on the grass. Instead, she is fed silage (wet, fermented grass) and a high concentrate mix of cereal, soya, sunflower meal and maize.

Currently, an estimated 16% of UK dairy farms have adopted the zero-graze system and the number, sadly, is expected to grow.

Up to 50% of cows used for their dairy suffer from mastitis, an infection of the udder which causes secretion of pus.

Mastitis can be treated with antibiotics, however, this would cause the milk to be deemed unsuitable for human consumption, resulting in a loss of profit for the industry.

For this reason, if the disease has not been diagnosed or is not imminently threatening the cow’s life, cows on some farms are still milked anyway.

Because of the unnatural and barren conditions cows are kept in, they often become lame over time. Forcing them to stand for long periods of time on hard floors, improper or neglected trimming of their hooves, malnourishment, infections and overall poor quality of the facilities are the main reasons many cows lack strength and become debilitated.

Lameness affects on average 25% of cows exploited for their milk.