I #sharethelove By Being Vegan-- The Truth Behind Dairy

All too often, us vegans hear that we are preachy, that we shove our beliefs in people's faces and that basically, we just need to shut the hell up. My response to this is and always will be, if I shove my beliefs in your face what do you call the mass fast food commercials you watch on TV, the billboards of animal secretions and bodies pictured lining the streets, the fast food joint on every corner and restaurant who promotes their succulent sirloins and famous milkshakes? My question is when did you choose to eat animals? Did you know as a child that that hotdog on your plate was actually the ground up body of someone, I am certain, the majority of you would have called your friend? When did you decide to choose cruelty over compassion?

Now that I've cleared up the misconceptions of preachy vegans and belief shoving, let me get to the real point of this post. Farmers Dairy, a beloved down to earth, homey, friendly company that every Atlantic Canadian knows. Their ads seem to be creeping up everywhere these days, the local papers, the bus stop shelters, billboards, huge ads lining the sides of our public buses, and the list goes on and on. Pictures of cows kissing farmers, woman kissing farmers, little girls sipping their glass of milk, everything that makes you feel at home and like you should be drinking a tall glass of pus, oops I mean milk.

Their slogan, "Everyone loves Farmers" works on your psyche in 2 ways, we love our farmers because they provide us with food, with nourishment, with our basic necessities. They use this as a way to make you think beyond their product but farmers as a whole. Secondly, it shows their product as if it is the necessity, the nourishment and food we need.

The picture of the cow kissing the farmer is so far from the truth, so misleading and so plain disgusting I can't even look without feeling the need to vomit. Let me show you reality, let me give you a glimpse of the life of a dairy cow. Whether you buy organic, pasture fed, free-range, grass fed, hormone free, etc. dairy products, you are still supporting the sexual violation, kidnapping and slaughter of some of the worlds most gentle beings. There is no happy cow on a dairy farm.

Farmers Dairy has a new campaign known as "share the love." A contest in celebrating all the ways you share the love with Farmers milk every day. I am trying to figure out where the love is for the cows who are mistreated every day because of their products.

                                                            The Real Price of Dairy

Sexual Violation: I realize people get upset with the word rape, that somehow it's exclusive to human females. It boggles my mind, especially when self-proclaimed feminists can't see beyond their own species (see speciesism). As all females, to produce milk, you must be pregnant and give birth. The gestation period for a cow, just like a human woman is 9 months. Nine months she carries her baby inside her, 9 months she dreams about nourishing, taking care of and loving her child, just like you would. The majority of dairy cows in Canada, and the rest of the world are artificially inseminated (see article for stats). This commonly entails a human arm with a syringe of bull semen being inserted fully into the cows rectal/vaginal area (see here). Now I don't know about you but I can't imagine it being a very comfortable or pleasant experience for the cow. If this was done to human woman, the moral outrage would be beyond anything we can imagine. Why then, is this accepted simply because they are of another species, one that has no voice to speak out for itself?

Kidnapping: How often I hear people gasp at the thought of someone eating veal. How can someone eat a baby? By drinking milk, you are directly supporting the veal industry. In fact, without dairy, there would be no veal industry. You see, the male calves are an unwanted byproduct of dairy. Remember how I talked about a woman needing to be pregnant and give birth to produce milk? Well that means lots of offspring, in turn, they need a place to go. In animal agriculture, if you have no dollar value, you have no value whatsoever. If you are lucky enough, or unlucky enough, to be born female, they may keep you around simply to suffer the same fate as their mother. Males, on the other hand, shortly after being born are taken from their mother and sent to live their life as a veal calf. Most of which are kept in small crates where they cannot move. They are fed formula and most have never even had the chance to suckle from their mother. The average age of slaughter for a veal calf is between 18 to 20 weeks, still just babies. As you would imagine, the pain of separating mother and child is unbearable. Mother cows have been reported to bellow for many hours or even days after her calf is taken from her. Cows, just like all animals, are intelligent. They have the same wants, needs and hopes that you or I do.

Slaughter: Their natural life span is 20-25 years old, but you would never know it, as cows on modern dairy farms are exhausted and spent after just 3-4 years at which point they are sent to slaughter, where they end up as cheap beef. Many people, including vegetarians, believe that somehow the dairy industry is a much nicer life than that of beef cattle but in reality, it's quite the opposite. No animal industry is pleasant but of all the industries, the dairy is quite possibly the most cruel. Being constantly pregnant, hooked to machines to drain your milk where many get bad infections known as mastitis, your children, 1 after the other taken from you and then, when you are no longer considered profitable, you are sent to your demise. A sad miserable life.

So now, I pose this question to you Farmers Dairy and all other dairy companies, how can you at all claim you #sharethelove? I am sure every single cow on your farms would disagree that there is any love there.

There is no argument, cows milk is for baby cows. Get weened, go vegan!

Visit here for your guide to vegan milks.