Record-breaking for whom?
The heart-wrenching photo of Maxima, the dairy cow, shows her standing alone inside, lugging a bloated udder, looking despondent (“Remembering Maxima, the record-breaking dairy cow,” Aug. 3). Her babies, for whom she makes milk, gone — taken soon after birth. While the dairy industry marveled at her productivity, here’s what she endured, like all dairy cows.
Milk comes from rape by forced impregnation in “rape racks”— a technical term I’ve seen the farm catalogues. Thereafter, cows stand for hours, enslaved as milking machines. Their bull calves are sent to slaughter to become veal. On the way, missing their moms, they suckle their killers’ fingers. Female calves will be used like their mothers, who called out for their stolen babies — bellowed and mourned. Still young — between ages 4 to 6 years — worn-out cows, who produce no more milk, are slaughtered for meat — hamburger, mostly— otherwise they could have lived 25 years.
We humans are the only species stealing another species’ babies’ food, and here’s the deadly irony: dairy sickens humans. By law, it can contain 3% pus. It’s a leading cause of breast cancer (taken from other females’ breasts!) and of prostate cancer. It lines our arteries with plaque, causing heart disease and dementia. It’s associated with Crohn’s Disease and ulcerative colitis, and it helps drive Type 2 diabetes, among other life-threatening and debilitating diseases like MS. It wreaks our gut biome, making us more susceptible to infections and cancer (read research not funded by the dairy industry). Then there’s the World Health Organization that labels red meats — including hamburger from dairy cows — a Group 1 carcinogen, like plutonium and asbestos.
Methane and manure from cows also destroy the environment: 80% of cropland goes to farmed animal food production, not to crops for humans. None of this is farsighted, humane, and/or healthy. Don’t believe bucolic, delusive myths about dairy farms and cows. Instead, look into their eyes and say, “You will be sexually assaulted repeatedly, your babies stolen, and then you will be killed, so I can have ice cream and hamburgers.”
Meg Hurley, Claremont
This letter was reprinted to correct an editing error related to cancer-causing properties in beef.