How does eating dairy products (e.g., milk, cheese and ice cream) harm cows?
Like all mammals, cows only produce milk after giving birth to feed their babies. In order to keep them lactating year-round, farmers artificially inseminate dairy cows and force them to give birth every year, which is not their natural behavior. A cow’s gestation period is the same as that of a human mother, and each cow is expected to produce milk during seven of her pregnancy’s nine months. With genetic manipulation and mechanized production, modern dairy cows produce 100 pounds of milk a day – ten times more than they would produce in nature. While cows can live well into their twenties, they are slaughtered for hamburger when their milk production declines, which usually occurs well before their fifth birthday. To prevent baby cows on factory farms from drinking “our” milk, they are taken from their mothers within 24 hours of birth. While female calves are raised to eventually replace their mothers as milk producers, most male calves born to dairy cows are raised for veal. These b
