Cows

We know that cows are beings who have the capacity to feel complex emotions. It has been scientifically proven, with a lot of data, that it has the same neurological substrate that generates consciousness as humans.

No matter the label, there is no way to obtain dairy products that does not cause suffering in these animals. Cows go through a range of physical suffering, stress and fear, regardless of whether the farm she is kept on is organic, free-range, grass-fed, etc. They are attached to milking devices that are brutal and give them electric shocks and often cause abrasions. Their extra teats are cut off, their horns are most of the time cut off, they are mutilated alive, for example, their tails are cut off. The cows, we understand well, do not want to cooperate, so we hit them with fists and sticks, bend their tails, prick them with a pitchfork, stab them, etc. They spend their lives, in almost all cases, without exercise, on cement or metal in their own urine and excrement and become, at some point in their lives, lame like 100% of cows that do not live in a pasture. There is more suffering in a glass of milk or a piece of cheese than in a piece of flesh, because even though animals consumed for their flesh live a life of misery and are killed in terror and pain, they die young.

To produce milk, bulls must be masturbated by hand or with an electro-ejaculator in the anus until ejaculation. The cows are confined (mostly chained) and forcibly inseminated: a farm worker sticks her hand into the cows' sexual opening and pumps semen into them with a steel device in order to impregnate it. Then, their calves are stolen so that the milk produced naturally for them can instead be sold and consumed by humans, leaving the disoriented mothers crying in pain for days, sometimes for weeks. The babies stolen from them, and who will not drink their mother's milk, are isolated in individual stalls in the middle of calf pens, then dehorned with or without anesthesia and given a soy milk mixture. Males will be castrated. Baby male calves, considered a by-product of the dairy industry, can be shot in the head shortly after birth or condemned to a short life of suffering before being killed and cut into pieces. Most female babies are destined for the same fate as their mothers. In some cases, when breeders only have a few cows, when the cows realize that the veterinarian is coming, they move as far away as possible. They remember the sperm gun that will be pushed inside her.

Cows are not meant to be constantly pregnant. Yet they are artificially inseminated over and over again until their bodies become exhausted, then they are slaughtered to become cheap meat. They could live in the wild for around 25 years, but after 4 to 6 years they are exhausted and sent to the slaughterhouse. If the cows, "organic" or not, have given birth to four calves, three will be killed at birth or after a few months because they are not needed or will be used for beef production. To increase profit, when they go to the slaughterhouse, we arrange for the cows to be pregnant and their calf to be ready to be born.

You might think that "organic" cows are treated better than others. But it's quite the opposite. For example, as they cannot receive antibiotics, when they have inflammation of the mammary gland in the breasts or udders, usually due to bacterial infection via a damaged nipple or teat, since cows are not not kept in natural situations, a tool is screwed into their udder and pulled down, which is extremely painful. This operation must be repeated after a short time.

These kinds of environments bring out the worst in workers. Every time we carry out a clandestine investigation, we never come back and say that there is no violence. Virtually all of the animal products we consume come from factory farms. Cows are often milked by machines and 92% of them will spend their days tied to a pole in a tie-stall. They will experience infections (such as mastitis, when their udders are overworked) and some, called cannulated cows or fistulated cows, will have their sides pierced, sealed with a plug, to facilitate the work of breeders, veterinarians and researchers.