Cows: Beef or Dairy, They Are All Abused and Slaughtered

The cows we eat are routinely branded, receiving third-degree burns. Their horns are either torn out or gouged out. And they are castrated. All without an anesthetic.

Dairy cows have it even worse. Most dairy cows are tied in place for their entire lives, unable even to walk around. To keep their milk flowing, they are impregnated every year, and their calves are taken away immediately so that they don’t get any of the milk. This causes great suffering to both mother and child, and a cow will often bellow for days after her baby has been taken away.

Except for the few added to the dairy line, these calves become veal, to be raised in darkness and isolation, in stalls too small to lie down in. They are fed iron-free diets to keep them anemic, and slaughtered at just six weeks of age. The dairy industry and the veal industry are the same industry.

Giving birth and being milked constantly wears the cows' bodies down, so that these animals who normally live to 25 years are spent by the time they're six, and sent to slaughter like the rest. All these cows endure transport to slaughter for up to days without any food or water, sweltering under the summer heat or freezing to death in the harsh winter.

At the slaughterhouse, they are given painful shocks with electric prods, including in their eyes and anuses, to get them to go up the chute as they smell the blood and hear the screams of the animals before them. For non-kosher meat, cows are supposed to be stunned, but because stunning is a far-from-perfect process,cows routinely have their limbs chopped off and their skin peeled off while alive and conscious.

This is the horrific, bloody end to their life of misery. And all just because we like the taste of meat.