You've got milk (but it's unhealthy and cruel)

Imagine, one day after giving birth to your precious child, it is cruelly torn away from you. Meanwhile you are attached to a pump that constantly milks you, whilst you are fed antiobiotics and hormones to enable you to produce yet more milk. Your child is being fed milk replacers, including blood from your own species, so that your milk can be sold to other humans. You spend another 5 years standing on a cold concrete floor, surrounded by your own waste whilst you are forced to produce around 50 pounds of milk every day. You develop inflammation of the mammary glands (mastitis), perhaps caused by E.coli or other bacteria, and then you are sent off to be slaughtered.

If we saw this happening to human beings, we would call it torture, yet it happens to cows on a daily basis, so that we can consume milk, which we think is healthy for us (this is a grave misconception!) and many people don't even bat an eye lid. Many consider the lives of the cows to be less valuable than their own, but this is just a product of tradition and conditioning. A life is a life, by any other name.

Female cows are artifically inseminated a short while after their first birthdays. Once they have given birth they lactate for 10 months, before being inseminated again. Cows natural lifespan is around 25 years, but the stress caused by the poor conditions in animal factories results in disease and reproductive problems that makes the cows worthless to the dairy industry after a few years, at which time they are sent to be slaughtered.

Milk production has increased from 116 billion pounds of milk per year in 1950, to 170 billion pounds in 2004, yet there are about 6 million less cows on U.S. dairy farms than there were in 1950. Normally cows would only produce 16 pounds of milk each day for their calves, but they are forced to produce 50 pounds per day, to create milk for human consumption. Cows would usually live off grass, but they are forced to eat dead animals to increase their milk production.

Milk can potentially contain E.coli or one of 150 other types of bacteria. In one millilitre milk can legally contain as much as 750,000 somatic cells (white blood cells and skin cells that are shed from the lining of the udder.) Studies have demonstrated that giving cows cleaning housing, more space and improved diets and bedding, lowers the somatic cell count as well as cases of mastitis.

Drinking milk also subsidises the veal industry. Male calves are taken away from their mothers when they are one day old and chained into cramped stalls for three to 18 weeks, to be raised for veal. They are fed a milk substitute that causes them to gain a minimum of 2 pounds per day. Their diet is deliberately iron deficient causing anaemia, to make their flesh remain pale. Rennet, an ingredient found in many cheeses, is created from an enzyme in their stomachs. The calves suffer from diarrhea, pneumonia, and lameness as well as being frightened and longing for their mothers.

Large dairy farms damage the environment, as manure from the animals pollutes groundwater, rivers and streams. Animals in animal factories, which includes dairy farms, generate 1.65 billion tonnes of manure each year, much of this contaminates our waterways and drinking water. Farmed cows and sheep are responsible for almost two fifths of the total quantity of methane created by human activity. Methane is much more detrimental as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. One litre of methane has the same effect as over 60 litres of carbon dioxide. The contribution of animal farming to climate change exceeds our transport system. Livestock are also responsible for 9% of all CO2 emissions.

The rearing of livestock uses up over two-thirds of agricultural land in the world and one cow, reared by the dairy-products industry, can drink around 50 gallons of water per day.

Humans are the only species that imbibe milk after infancy or drink the milk of another species (apart from the milk fed to animals by humans). Cow's milk is designed to meet the nutritional requirements of calves, not human beings! According to the American Gastroenterogical Association, cow's milk is the primary cause of food allergies among infants and children. Studies have shown that autism and schizophrenia in children may be connected to the body's inability to process casein (a milk protein). When the children were given milk-free diets, symptoms of these diseases vanished or decreaseed in 80% of the case studies.

We think we need milk for calcium, but although American women consume huge quantities of calcium they have some of the highest incidences of osteoporosis in the world. Chinese people consume half the amount of calcium and have low rates of the illness. Medical studies have suggested that milk can actually increase women's risk of developing osteoporosis, to the point where, T. Colin Campbell, professor of nutritional biochemistry at Cornell University has said, "The association between the intake of animal protein and fracture rates appears to be as strong as that between cigarette smoking and lung cancer."

Humans can get adequate protein from nuts, seeds, beans, grains and other legumes. Eating too much animal protein has been linked with an array of illnesses, including colon and liver cancer.

The alternative is to stop buying milk! There are plenty of other options, such as: soya milk, rice milk, oat milk and almond milk. They taste better, they don't come from a cow's colostrum, they are much healthier and don't involved animal cruelty!

[via Peta]