Another Inconvenient Truth ~ Mel Baker

[Carolyn Bailey]

I am writing in support of Jenny Moxham’s recent article - “Roo’s hardly
the only ones to suffer “ in the Geelong Advertiser, 24th of September.
Like everyone I too feel incensed by the senseless and brutal killing of
a majestic innocent sentinel being, by those Torquay College students.
Like Jenny though I am also acutely aware of the socially conditioned,
“schizophrenic”, illogical and often ignorant responses our society has
to the violence and exploitation we routinely inflict on other living
beings.

 

Let’s talk milk. Jenny touched on the link between milk and the slaughter of millions of calves and their mothers. So many in the community lap up the happy cow image projected daily by the
dairy industry. Many of us think that cows “like to be milked”, “need to
be milked”. What they don’t realise is that cows, like all mammals only
produce milk to feed their young. As mothers and women I wonder how the
sisters of my community feel about the fact that to produce milk we
breed cows solely for the purpose of producing milk. First though we
dehorn them, cut off their tails and brand them. This is all without any
form of anesthetic as this would effect profits. All practices that are
illegal for dogs and cats.

 

We then enslave her, impregnate her and finally we steal and slaughter her children so that they may not drink her milk, and so that we may. Research has shown that
the bond of mother cows with their young is just as powerful as is that
of humans. Cows have been documented to cry and bellow for days after
their young have been taken. Some stop eating, others have broken their
necks chasing the trucks their babies are barrelled into, off to be
slaughtered for veal. She will endure this lost every year of her short
and painful life. One baby for every year of life - stolen and
slaughtered. After the first stolen baby she will know as she gives
birth the fate her second born is destined and often kicks and screams
and tries to run away during labour.

 

If that is not enough so often these beautiful creatures natural milks are often modified to volumes terrifically higher than they would produce naturally to keep
pace with our enormous demand for her body fluids. This can and often
causes joint and muscle inflammation and insidiously painful mastitis.
At the tender age of usually 4 years to 7 years old as opposed to the 20
-25 years they would survive naturally they are deemed as “spent” and
no longer able to produce the amount of milk deemed useful by the
industry, they are not as we all like to think, put out to green
pastures to live out the rest of their natural life. They are sent to
slaughter for our burgers.

 

Their transport to slaughter just has miserable. Many are so weak by destination that they are unable to walk off the trucks and they are dragged into the abattoirs before
being electrocuted and their throats cut. If we think it couldn’t get
any worse there are many accounts from abattoir workers on the line that
these wretched ladies are often not dead or even unconscious when they
reach each station of dismemberment. And the last and cruellest reality
is that many are pregnant at time of slaughter, some in their third
trimester. As their life blood drains from the wound in their neck their
unborn babies kick inside their dying wretched bodies. These children
are, like their brothers and sisters before them are yet another by
product of the dairy industry. They are cut out of their mother’s guts
and left to drop on the floor to die and thrown into waste shoots. The
industry sees these babies as an inconvenient loss of revenue.

 

Too upsetting to read? Too painful to imagine? I don’t think one can imagine such a “life” and death. Yet we still choose to drink milk,
purchase ice-cream, eat cheese, enjoy our chocolate and buy a myriad of
products that contain her their precious milk. All the while our
governments call this treatment “standard practice”.

 

So many of us just don’t want to know though.

 

We are all so outraged by the slaughter of that poor kangaroo. We want to be a part of the outrage, want to talk about it to our work collegues on
Monday. Yet if someone dares to raise the inherent cruely inflicted
daily on our cows in the relentless pursuit of our dairy products we
will look back at them blankly, publicly mock them, become defensive of
the practices, deny they happen,demand to know where they got their
information from,  protest the graphic description, revel in our comfort
of being a majority, blame them for being too sensitive and extreme,
blame them for not caring about human rights, feel lectured and preached
at, display total apathy and strangest of most become incensed at the
messenger? It’s too hard to hear, too inconvenient a reality that our
supermarket purchases that we so love are intrinsically linked and
directly contribute to despair?

 

That poor kangaroo. Her death was vile by all accounts. I dearly hope though that her life was better than our suffering dairy cows.

 

Where is our outrage for them...?

Mel Baker is a freelance writer from Australia.

http://www.facebook.com/notes/mel-baker/another-inconvenient-truth/...

[Lisa Blundell]

I wish people opened their eyes and could see what they're contributing to... unnecessary cruelty to these poor animals and their babies. If only they would put themselves in their shoes and imagine how it would feel having your baby ripped away from you, and for what? So humans can eat their baby and continuously milk the mother non stop and then kill to eat her too? So much greed.

[blackpanther]

what you say is true, but NO ANIMAL should be tortured and killed, neither cows nor kangaroos!