Factory Made Milk

Many people would be tempted to think that dairy farming, unlike other forms of factory farming isn't cruel since it is not necessary to kill a cow to obtain milk. Unfortunately dairy producers have embraced the same industrial approach—less space, more productivity—as the meat industry. While there are now only half the number of dairy cows in the United States that there were 40 years ago, they produce more milk. Dairy farms have been consolidated into fewer but larger operations. In other words, milk factories.

Dairy producers achieve unnatural productivity through selective breeding and the use of
hormones including the much publicized bovine growth hormone or bGH which can increase a cow's milk yield by as much as 40 percent.

The result is a life of pain and stress for the
helpless cow whose body was never designed to produce six or more tons of milk each year. Their udders become painfully oversized and sometimes scrape along the ground. Mastitis, an extremely painful infection of the udder—and a result of the use of bGH—is commonplace.

Like their cousins in the meat industry, Dairy cows, for the most part, do not spend their days in fields or feed on grass. Herded indoors like so many other farm animals, they live in squalid
factories often chained in narrow stalls. Twice or more a day, they are connected to automated milking machines where the discomfort of their abnormal milk load is temporarily relieved.

The stress shows in their short lives—only about a third of a cow's natural life expectancy. Worn out after six or seven years of constant milk
production, they are slaughtered. Since their meat does not meet usual consumer expectations they most often wind up as ground meat in hamburgers.