Motherly Love!

   So lovely to see a mother cow feeding her calf- they are at Hillside Animal Sanctuary  ( hillside.org.uk ) where VegaNation ( www.veganation.co.uk ) had a works outing on Sunday! 

  Interesting to notice that this mother does not have that horrible sign of the overworked, downtrodden calf-less dairy cow- an enormous swollen udder ballooning out underneath her- she has her calf suckling and so produces exactly as much milk as her calf needs and no more! She's looks well fed (of course she does- she's at Hillside!) again, very different from the  gaunt, boney physique of the typical dairy cow who is producing milk (to feed her insatiable human babies) far beyond what is natural or healthy for her- the amount of milk that modern dairy cows produce at peak lactation is more than TEN TIMES the amount that she would normally be producing to feed her calf.  Compare the Hillside cow to the dairy cow below in this picture from Animal Aid.

 This is why we are vegan not vegetarian- I breast fed my own children and the thought of what cows go through- having their babies taken away at birth (and if they are male, shot)  and then their breast milk stolen from for the next ten months whilst they are pregnant with their next calf,  is absolutely unbearable. Cows form very strong attachments to their calves and at Hillside you can see cows very much bonded with their adult calves; I don't think that anyone can even imagine the suffering that dairy cows endure before they are killed and their prematurely worn out bodies used for cheap meat products such as burgers.

“The  dairy cow is exposed to more abnormal physiological demands than any other farm animal. She is the supreme example of an overworked mother.”

– Professor John Webster, Bristol University’s Veterinary Science Department


Professor John Webster, in The Welfare of Dairy Cattle, states, “The amount of work done by the cow in peak lactation is immense…To achieve a comparably high work rate a human would have to jog for about 6 hours a day, every day.”