Animals on a modern factory farm lead lives of unimaginable suffering and die cruel  deaths in order to end up on the dinner table.  Intense competition drives farmers to value profits and efficiency over the  animals natural desires or  quality of life.   Animals are squeezed into ever smaller living quarters, even as new biotechnology is used to make animals grow bigger and produce more meat, milk or eggs.  Lowering the cost per unit is the overriding goal.

FACTORY FARMED PIGS
 

There is no sunshine, no liberty, or freedom, or joy for farmed pigs; there is only suffering and misery from the day they are born to the day they die.  Many people who know pigs compare them to dogs because they are friendly, loyal, and intelligent. Pigs spend their entire   lives in cramped, filthy warehouses, under constant stress from the intense confinement and denied everything that is natural to them.   As piglets, they are taken away from their mothers when they are less than 1 month old, their tails are cut off, some of their teeth are cut off, and the males have their testicles ripped out of their scrotums (castration), all without any pain relief.   They spend their entire lives in overcrowded pens on a tiny slab of filthy concrete. Breeding sows spend their entire miserable lives in tiny metal crates where they can't even turn around. Shortly after giving birth, they are once again forcibly impregnated.  This cycle continues for years until their bodies finally give out and they are sent to be killed.  When the time comes for slaughter, these smart and sensitive animals are forced onto transport trucks to travel to be slaughtered. 

BATTERY HENS

Start by imagining a space not much bigger than the computer screen you’re looking at right now-smaller in size than an A4 sheet of   paper.  Now, imagine trying to fit a whole adult chicken inside that space, and keeping her there for her entire life. You don’t even have to  imagine a perch or nest as a hen in a battery cage wouldn’t have these either.  Then, imagine that same hen is in a wire cage with four other hens, and surrounded   by hundreds, thousands, millions of other hens just like her. That’s how many hens are living in this situation in Australia right now; over 12.5 million hens producing more than 193 million eggs each year.   Not one of them ever being able to walk around, peck or bathe in the dust, stretch or flap their wings.  These conditions would be considered unacceptable for many other kinds of animal – yet these hens continue to suffer, every minute, of every hour, of every day in battery farms all over Australia.

This is a baby female chicken having the end of her beak cut off with the hot knife on the debeaking machine. This is extremely painful.

  

DAIRY COWS

Cows produce milk for the same reason that humans do—to feed their babies. To keep giving milk, cows must be forcibly impregnated through artificial insemination every year. The cows’ babies are generally taken away within a day of being born—male calves are destined to become veal, while females are sentenced to the same fate as their mothers. Mother cows on dairy farms can often be seen searching and calling for their babies after they have been taken away.  In the U.S.A the cattle expert Dr. T. Grandin wrote of a visit that he made to a dairy farm and of the great distress of bellowing that was heard when he arrived:  “They must have separated the calves from the cows this morning, there was one cow outside the stockade, roaming, looking for her calf, and bellowing, she wanted her baby.  Bellowing for it, hunting for it. She stops for a while, and then starts again. It’s like grieving, mourning—not much written about it. People don’t like to allow them thoughts or feelings”.
 

THE MILKING PROCESS.

The mother cow will be hooked up several times a day to machines that take the milk intended for her calf. Through genetic manipulation, and intensive milking, she will produce about three times as much milk as she would naturally. According to the industry’s own figures, between 30 and 50 percent of   dairy cows suffer from mastitis, which is an extremely painful condition. A cow’s natural lifespan is 25 years, but a cow used by the dairy industry is killed after only four or five years. By the time they are killed, an industry study reports that nearly 40 percent of dairy cows are lame because of the filth, intensive confinement, and the strain of constantly being pregnant and giving milk.  Dairy cows are turned into soup, companion animal food, or low-grade hamburger meat, their bodies too “spent” to be used for anything else.

To learn more about Milk and the dairy industry check out Animal Liberation Victoria's campaign 'MILK SUCKS'
or Peta's 'Milk Sucks' website.


                                      


A writer named Gene Franks wrote an article that was published called 'Milk Sucks - Bossies Revenge' which is a really interesting read all about the milk industry propaganda that we are raised to believe. I've picked out a few 'facts' for you to think about and although it is an American article, the facts are worth considering.

Here are several things about milk that the ads don't tell you:

1. Milk is "a natural" only for baby calves. Calves have fours stomachs and double their body weight in 47 days. Human babies have only one stomach and a much slower rate of growth. It takes human babies 180 days or so to double their weight, so they don't need nearly as much protein as calves. Cows' milk is 15% protein (it has 15% of its calories as protein); human breast milk is 5 % protein. Much of the rationale for believing that cows' milk is an ideal food for human babies was based on research done with rats early in this century. The milk of mother rats is 49% protein and baby rats double their weight in just 4 days. This is yet another example of the difficulties we create for ourselves by trying to imitate rats.

2. Continuing to drink milk into adulthood is unnatural to all species. Only man could rationalize such weird behavior and learn to view it as "natural."

3. Decades of meat and dairy propaganda have made Americans the world's most outrageous protein gluttons. The most frequent question vegetarians hear is, "Where do you get your protein?" The answer is, "Where do horses, cows, gorillas, elephants, and giraffes get their protein?" Corpse-milk-egg protein is secondhand protein, inferior in quality to plant protein. And all plants, even lettuce, have protein. Here again is George Bernard Shaw: "Think of the fierce energy concentrated in an acorn! You bury it in the ground, and it explodes into a giant oak! Bury a sheep, and nothing happens but decay! "

4. Although the officially recommended daily requirement for protein is probably more than double what we really need, government and university experts regularly advise that we take in an extra 30% or so just to be safe. More is better. When asked who needs this extra 30%, Dr. David Reuben, who popularized the importance of dietary fiber, replied:

The people who sell meat, fish, cheese, eggs, chicken, and all the other high prestige and expensive sources of protein. Raising the amount of protein you eat by 30% raises their income by 30%. It also increases the amount of protein in the sewers and septic tanks of your neighborhood 30% as you merrily urinate away everything that you can't use that very _ day. It also deprives the starving children of the world of the protein that would save their lives. Incidentally, it makes you pay 30% of your already bloated food bill for protein you will never use [and] puts another $36 billion a year into the pockets of the protein producers. 

5. Question: Where do people who don't drink milk get their calcium?

Answer: Where do cows get their calcium?

6. Question: Who needs the excess calcium that experts recommend?

Answer: The people who sell milk, cheese, and other high prestige and expensive sources of calcium. Raising the amount of calcium you eat by X amount raises their income by X amount.

7. Nutrition writer Frieda Kabelac says:

We have been thoroughly mis-educated about calcium and proteins, thanks to the dairy and meat interests, which have penetrated the school systems with their propaganda. So ingrained is the idea that we need milk after the weaning period for calcium that people doubt that we can get enough calcium from plant foods.

8. Calcium deficiency usually does not arise from too little calcium but from too much protein. Dr. John Scharffenberg writes:

A very high calcium intake is necessary in the United States diet because a high-protein diet increases  excretion of calcium. In one study, men 18-20 years of age were given protein ranging from 48-141 gm. daily. The higher levels of protein doubled the urinary excretion of calcium when both calcium and phosphorus intake were held constant.... A diet high in meat with its high protein content will therefore increase urinary excretion of calcium.... Vegetarians have significantly greater bone density than omnivores; thus vegetarians appear to be less prone to osteoporosis.

9, The dairy industry has spent millions funding a variety of research schemes aimed at proving that milk is good for us. Meanwhile, what is probably the most extensive epidemiological study ever undertaken in the field of nutrition found, decisively, that the opposite is true.

10. If you plan to "cut down" on the fat overdose by drinking "low fat" milk, consider Bob LeRoySiBrava's advice: "Healthwise, shifting from fattier meats to 'leaner' meats, cutting skin off poultry, reducing the number of times per week you eat egg yolks, and substituting 1% milk products for most whole milk products, is comparable to cutting smoking down to one pack per day."

11. If cancer, heart disease, and osteoporosis aren't enough, here are a few more health problems that have been associated in medical literature with milk and excessive calcium:  kidney stones, gallstones aging and wrinkling of the skin, "frozen shoulder," tendonitis, bursitis, heel spurs, otosclerosis ( which leads to deafness), bloating, cramping, diarrhea (of various types), colic, runny nose, bronchitis, asthma, inflammatory arthritis, eczema, ulcerative colitis, lymphatic leukemia, Hodgkins disease, multiple sclerosis, iron deficiency (due to milk-induced gastrointestinal bleeding), and even crime. [An article in the Journal of Orthomological Psychiatry  (8:149, 1979)  reported that the juvenile offenders studied drank twice as much milk as the control group.]