"..alone and afraid in a world I never made.." comes from A. E. Houseman. You can read the full work containing this phrase here.
The video is of a Canadian dairy cow that has reached a point in her life where the human or group of humans that had her enslaved have decided she is no longer "profitable" in terms of the amount of milk her body is able to produce so she is awaiting "sale".... after that sale she will be killed and her exhausted flesh will be used to make something some human somewhere can order at a fast food place.
The video is brief (about 37 seconds) and only shows this one cow person...there is no violence shown. As you look at her think about the children she was forced to give birth to who were then taken away from her, think about her grief, her suffering....her life used up so human animals could make money and drink baby cow food (milk) or eat sugared up frozen baby cow food (ice cream) or use the fats from baby cow food (butter) to spread on their toast with jam.
Her life, taken from her...now she awaits the ending of that existence. It may be that it will be a relief for her...I don't know. She is likely only 5 or 6 years old and not near the end of her natural lifespan...I don't know her thoughts or her feelings...but I can guess.
Look at her and know that she is where she is and feeling how she feels and looking like she does because the nice and kind and clean and smiling humans go to the "dairy" section of their "supermarket" and pick up some "milk" or some "butter" or to the frozen food section and pick up some "ice cream" or to the "custard" place for a treat. Those nice and kind and clean and smiling humans who would not be cruel to an "animal", who would not harm an "animal", who would not neglect an "animal".
Somehow all those nice and kind and clean and smiling humans, only wanting something that "tastes good" end up being responsible for this forlorn and sad and hurt and exhausted and doomed cow person's situation.
I look at her and know that for years I drank "milk" and ate "ice cream" and spread "butter" with virtually carefree abandon and thoughtlessness...thoughtless at least as far as thinking about who was actually paying the price for the drinking and eating and spreading. If the being that the "milk" came from crossed my mind at all it was only in passing and only...maybe...that cows "give" milk and it didn't hurt her. For the cow babies taken from her no thoughts occurred...they didn't exist in my universe. Ignorance was bliss...for me...but not for her, not for her children.
I didn't think, I didn't consider, I didn't wonder, I didn't investigate...and I didn't feel responsible...what was there to be responsible for? And she and her children paid daily for my ignorance and carelessness and I blithely drank and ate and spread misery and suffering and horror...on her and her babies.
The world lied to me, corporations lied to me, 4-H lied to me, FFA lied to me, farmers lied to me, my family lied to me, and I lied to me. We all said it is ok to "use" animals, we all said it is "necessary", we all said it is not cruel, we all said it is "humane", we all said "don't worry about it", we all said "they don't have feelings", we all said "they don't care".
Look at the video, look at her exhaustion and despair and hopelessness and see the result of our lies.
I can't tell you how painful it is for me to watch her...but it is appropriate that I feel horrid...it was because of me and others like me that she ended up where she is. I was doing things that caused pain and misery but not feeling the consequences of my actions...she was feeling those and she was doing nothing to cause the pain and misery she experienced. It was me, us that were causing it and it is fitting that I now feel some small measure of the pain I caused and it is only a small measure...I can never appreciate the depths of her suffering...I can never take it from her and place it on me...which is where it belongs.
She represents a segment of my "breaking the world". And I shall never be able to repair that segment, only to regret it...and to acknowledge it by showing this video of her suffering....her being broken.
If you are still participating in causing this kind of misery, please stop, no one has the right to inflict this kind of suffering on someone that is innocent of doing any harm ... who only wants to live her own life how she wants to. Who only wants what each of us want.
Showing posts with label milk. Show all posts
Showing posts with label milk. Show all posts
Friday, February 25, 2011
Sunday, August 15, 2010
Dairy is an innocuous sounding word..................
Got milk? Most of us who live here in the United States are familiar with the well known advertising campaign conducted by Goodby Silverstein & Partners for the California Milk Processor Board. The face of a familiar celebrity stuck in a magazine, newspaper or on a billboard with a photoshopped milk “moustache” has been with us since 1993 when the campaign began. The slogan “got milk?” was licensed to the National Milk Processor Board in 1995 and in 2006, the campaign went after a new demographic with a series of Spanish-language “Toma Leche?” ads.
Milk, cheese, ice cream, whipped cream……….I loved all of them. When I was a child we had a milk cow, she was a Jersey, a wonderful golden brown color. I have ever since thought they were the most beautiful of all the cow people. I have no memory of her having a baby but since mothers do not lactate unless there is a baby involved there must have been at least one. My older sister didn’t like milk and never drank it and I couldn’t believe anyone didn’t like milk. One of my favorite food combinations back then was chili and milk (another was a hamburger with homemade vanilla ice cream). My mother always told me chili and milk would make me sick, but it never did…….it should have.
Let’s walk through this together. Mammals, female mammals, produce milk to feed their babies. Doesn’t matter what the shape, size or form of the mammal, mother mammals produce milk for their babies. Whales, cows, humans, pigs, cats, rabbits, dogs, rats, skunks, deer, raccoons and squirrels all were born to mothers that lactated and all of the baby animals (if they were lucky) sucked milk from their mothers breast(s). In other words, cows are no different than any other mammal type animal, they are not especially configured to produce any more milk than is needed for her baby, any more than is a squirrel or a cat or a rat or a human.
Like everything else having to do with living beings, this is not a precise phenomenon…..some moms do not produce quite enough milk for their baby but most err a bit on the side of caution and end up having a little more milk than is needed for the baby’s survival……that’s when you get fat and happy babies.
Over time, as the baby mammal grows and becomes more able to digest and obtain food from the world (outside of the mom) the baby gets more and more nourishment from non-milk sources and the mothers milk production gradually tapers off and eventually stops. This is often a time of dismay and some conflict because in general babies want to keep on getting milk from mom for a longer time than they need it and usually for a longer time than mom wants to keep on being a suck object.
Well, how the hell did I end up with the opportunity to discover that cows milk and chili tasted good together? I wasn’t a cow baby, I wasn’t drinking my mothers milk (I was way too old for that). I was drinking milk that properly belonged to the baby of that pretty jersey cow. My father or my mother went out to the cow shed and took the baby cows milk from the mother cow. They strained it, let it set for a while, skimmed off most of the cream and voila, cows milk to drink with my chili. Everybody is happy right? Well, except maybe for the cow, who had the milk for her baby taken from her and the baby cow, who never got the milk that belonged to him or her. But the human animal (me) was happy and hey….that’s what counts, right?
Wrong, do the math, two cow animals (mom and baby) were screwed over so one human animal could have something they did not even need. Any animal old enough to obtain nutrition from sources other than moms milk does not need milk…….if fact the only adult animal in the world that drinks any kind of milk is, guess what…..human animals. Adult deer, adult gorillas, adult giraffes, adult kangaroos, adult tigers, adult lions, adult dolphins, none of them…..none…..drink milk of any kind after they are old enough to be weaned.
Milk is a starter fluid, if you will, for mammals, and each mammal animal mother has milk that is specifically tailored to provide the type of nourishment her baby needs. Human milk is constituted differently than rat milk, cow milk is constituted differently than whale milk, or human milk. Go here, take a look, you will see, each one is different, that’s because each animal species has different nutritional needs.
By the way, lactose is a type of sugar that is found only in milk, forsythia flowers and a few tropical shrubs. The enzyme needed to digest this sugar is most abundant in human intestines right after birth and then begins a slow decline. About 75% of adult humans have some degree of lactose intolerance…..in other words lactose is for babies………what a bunch of putzes we are.
Now, what we do to get our greedy little paws on all that cows milk you see stocked in the grocery store is we forcibly artificially inseminate cow animals (essentially this is a rape…the cow certainly does not agree to it) and when they begin lactating in preparation for their baby we take (steal) the milk from the cow. Then when the baby is born we take the baby away from the mother (because the cow baby would drink the milk) and we keep on stealing the milk from the mother.
Now she is 4 or 5 years old and sorry cow mom, you are not profitable enough anymore, off you go into the truck, then to the slaughterhouse and we kill the mother (terrifyingly and horribly) and turn her into hamburger meat. She is herself, barely into adulthood, cows have an average lifespan of 20 years or so if they have a beneficial environment and a suitable diet.
And then oblivious human children like me eat the hamburger (the flesh of the mother cow) with vanilla ice cream (milk for the mother cow’s baby) and think it tastes just fine…..sort of a crappy trick to play on a kid when you think about it. We early on become unwitting accomplices in rape, murder and baby theft.
What about the baby cows? Well, about 25% of them are taken and turned into milk cows to replace the ones we use, abuse and slaughter. That leaves 75% of the babies to be either killed immediately (sometimes smashed in the head with a hammer or some other obscene practice) or they are sold at auction to human animals who then chain them up or pen them up indoors for 3 or 4 months and feed the baby cows a diet deficient in iron so their flesh will stay a whitish color and then they are slaughtered for veal.
Milk means misery for the mother, she is raped then her baby is taken away….the mother cows cry and bellow for their babies sometimes for days and days. This happens to her for 4 or 5 years and then she is slaughtered.
Milk means misery for the baby, they are taken away from their mother and then either forced into a few years of repeated rape, of having their babies stolen and their baby’s milk stolen and then killed. Or the baby is destined to be chained or penned up, no sunshine, no playing, no exercise, no exploring, no learning about the world, no comfort from mother…..misery for 3 or 4 months and then killed….so some human animal somewhere can eat baby cow flesh (veal).
Got misery? This should be the slogan for the advertising campaign if it is to be honest, and the moustache should be a moustache of blood.
Dairy, what an innocuous sounding word for something that means horrors and pain and misery and death. All for something that tastes good……but it doesn’t taste good to me anymore. A taste is not worth doing such terrible things to someone as nifty and beautiful as that jersey cow, or any cow or any mother of any kind of animal, or any baby of any kind of animal. Never.
I want no part of it….none….I am a vegan and I am appalled and sorrowful and sad that I was too oblivious and was too lazy and too jaded and too cowardly to see through the lies and secrets that kept me away from living as a vegan all my life.
To hide the horror was and is a wrong and bad thing, the hiding keeps many human animals engaged in doing wrong and bad things to animal people that did nothing to them, that did nothing to deserve the misery we human animals heap on them. The oppression of and enslaving of and hurting of and killing of animal people is disgusting and horrible and wrong, wrong, wrong and I will participate in it no more and I will regret, for the rest of my life, that I ever did.
If I need a lactose fix, I will go chew on a forsythia or something, no more of this milk and ice cream and dairy stuff.....what a crock.
There are a number of videos around that graphically detail what goes on in these houses of horror they call a dairy........I will direct you to them if you email and request such.
Milk, cheese, ice cream, whipped cream……….I loved all of them. When I was a child we had a milk cow, she was a Jersey, a wonderful golden brown color. I have ever since thought they were the most beautiful of all the cow people. I have no memory of her having a baby but since mothers do not lactate unless there is a baby involved there must have been at least one. My older sister didn’t like milk and never drank it and I couldn’t believe anyone didn’t like milk. One of my favorite food combinations back then was chili and milk (another was a hamburger with homemade vanilla ice cream). My mother always told me chili and milk would make me sick, but it never did…….it should have.
 |
| Jersey Cow........ |
Let’s walk through this together. Mammals, female mammals, produce milk to feed their babies. Doesn’t matter what the shape, size or form of the mammal, mother mammals produce milk for their babies. Whales, cows, humans, pigs, cats, rabbits, dogs, rats, skunks, deer, raccoons and squirrels all were born to mothers that lactated and all of the baby animals (if they were lucky) sucked milk from their mothers breast(s). In other words, cows are no different than any other mammal type animal, they are not especially configured to produce any more milk than is needed for her baby, any more than is a squirrel or a cat or a rat or a human.
Like everything else having to do with living beings, this is not a precise phenomenon…..some moms do not produce quite enough milk for their baby but most err a bit on the side of caution and end up having a little more milk than is needed for the baby’s survival……that’s when you get fat and happy babies.
Over time, as the baby mammal grows and becomes more able to digest and obtain food from the world (outside of the mom) the baby gets more and more nourishment from non-milk sources and the mothers milk production gradually tapers off and eventually stops. This is often a time of dismay and some conflict because in general babies want to keep on getting milk from mom for a longer time than they need it and usually for a longer time than mom wants to keep on being a suck object.
Well, how the hell did I end up with the opportunity to discover that cows milk and chili tasted good together? I wasn’t a cow baby, I wasn’t drinking my mothers milk (I was way too old for that). I was drinking milk that properly belonged to the baby of that pretty jersey cow. My father or my mother went out to the cow shed and took the baby cows milk from the mother cow. They strained it, let it set for a while, skimmed off most of the cream and voila, cows milk to drink with my chili. Everybody is happy right? Well, except maybe for the cow, who had the milk for her baby taken from her and the baby cow, who never got the milk that belonged to him or her. But the human animal (me) was happy and hey….that’s what counts, right?
Wrong, do the math, two cow animals (mom and baby) were screwed over so one human animal could have something they did not even need. Any animal old enough to obtain nutrition from sources other than moms milk does not need milk…….if fact the only adult animal in the world that drinks any kind of milk is, guess what…..human animals. Adult deer, adult gorillas, adult giraffes, adult kangaroos, adult tigers, adult lions, adult dolphins, none of them…..none…..drink milk of any kind after they are old enough to be weaned.
Milk is a starter fluid, if you will, for mammals, and each mammal animal mother has milk that is specifically tailored to provide the type of nourishment her baby needs. Human milk is constituted differently than rat milk, cow milk is constituted differently than whale milk, or human milk. Go here, take a look, you will see, each one is different, that’s because each animal species has different nutritional needs.
By the way, lactose is a type of sugar that is found only in milk, forsythia flowers and a few tropical shrubs. The enzyme needed to digest this sugar is most abundant in human intestines right after birth and then begins a slow decline. About 75% of adult humans have some degree of lactose intolerance…..in other words lactose is for babies………what a bunch of putzes we are.
Now, what we do to get our greedy little paws on all that cows milk you see stocked in the grocery store is we forcibly artificially inseminate cow animals (essentially this is a rape…the cow certainly does not agree to it) and when they begin lactating in preparation for their baby we take (steal) the milk from the cow. Then when the baby is born we take the baby away from the mother (because the cow baby would drink the milk) and we keep on stealing the milk from the mother.
Now she is 4 or 5 years old and sorry cow mom, you are not profitable enough anymore, off you go into the truck, then to the slaughterhouse and we kill the mother (terrifyingly and horribly) and turn her into hamburger meat. She is herself, barely into adulthood, cows have an average lifespan of 20 years or so if they have a beneficial environment and a suitable diet.
And then oblivious human children like me eat the hamburger (the flesh of the mother cow) with vanilla ice cream (milk for the mother cow’s baby) and think it tastes just fine…..sort of a crappy trick to play on a kid when you think about it. We early on become unwitting accomplices in rape, murder and baby theft.
What about the baby cows? Well, about 25% of them are taken and turned into milk cows to replace the ones we use, abuse and slaughter. That leaves 75% of the babies to be either killed immediately (sometimes smashed in the head with a hammer or some other obscene practice) or they are sold at auction to human animals who then chain them up or pen them up indoors for 3 or 4 months and feed the baby cows a diet deficient in iron so their flesh will stay a whitish color and then they are slaughtered for veal.
Milk means misery for the mother, she is raped then her baby is taken away….the mother cows cry and bellow for their babies sometimes for days and days. This happens to her for 4 or 5 years and then she is slaughtered.
Milk means misery for the baby, they are taken away from their mother and then either forced into a few years of repeated rape, of having their babies stolen and their baby’s milk stolen and then killed. Or the baby is destined to be chained or penned up, no sunshine, no playing, no exercise, no exploring, no learning about the world, no comfort from mother…..misery for 3 or 4 months and then killed….so some human animal somewhere can eat baby cow flesh (veal).
Got misery? This should be the slogan for the advertising campaign if it is to be honest, and the moustache should be a moustache of blood.
Dairy, what an innocuous sounding word for something that means horrors and pain and misery and death. All for something that tastes good……but it doesn’t taste good to me anymore. A taste is not worth doing such terrible things to someone as nifty and beautiful as that jersey cow, or any cow or any mother of any kind of animal, or any baby of any kind of animal. Never.
I want no part of it….none….I am a vegan and I am appalled and sorrowful and sad that I was too oblivious and was too lazy and too jaded and too cowardly to see through the lies and secrets that kept me away from living as a vegan all my life.
To hide the horror was and is a wrong and bad thing, the hiding keeps many human animals engaged in doing wrong and bad things to animal people that did nothing to them, that did nothing to deserve the misery we human animals heap on them. The oppression of and enslaving of and hurting of and killing of animal people is disgusting and horrible and wrong, wrong, wrong and I will participate in it no more and I will regret, for the rest of my life, that I ever did.
If I need a lactose fix, I will go chew on a forsythia or something, no more of this milk and ice cream and dairy stuff.....what a crock.
There are a number of videos around that graphically detail what goes on in these houses of horror they call a dairy........I will direct you to them if you email and request such.
Wednesday, June 2, 2010
Sometimes, before sleeping......
Many nights before sleeping I think about the animals that are at that moment facing death in a slaughterhouse or about the cows standing in their own feces and breathing ammonia and dust in the feedlots. I cringe inside at what we humans are doing in pursuit of such trivialities as taste and profit.
I imagine the anguish the mother cow is feeling at the dairy, where her child has been taken from her, after she was forcibly impregnated. Her baby is taken so all the milk the mother cow produces can go into yogurt, butter, ice cream and profit. The milk was for her baby not for humans. I think about how she must feel, about how any parent feels when they cannot care for their child. The pain and misery make the ice cream not so attractive.
I sometimes think of the chickens trapped in cages, with no room to turn or spread their wings and that have been there all the day long while I was going about my life. I think about their having been there the day before, and the day before that, and the day before that, sometimes for up to 2 years. This is their whole life, then they are thrown into another cage, trucked to a slaughterhouse and brutally killed. For an omelet, for an easter egg, for a "nugget", for money.
I do this and sometimes then cannot sleep. It is not that I couldn't not do it, most of us have developed strategies to avoid thinking uncomfortable thoughts, I do it because I believe it to be respectful to do so. To be abused, oppressed, tortured and then killed is horrific but for such a thing to occur and no one to think about it and feel bad about it is.....beyond words.
My thoughts are nothing to those beings enduring the obscene treatment being forced upon them by my species but for me to not think those thoughts, for me to push them away and not allow myself to feel pained and sorrowful...........then I too would somehow be a participant in the silent animal holocaust that continues every moment of every day.
It might be that if we humans would allow ourselves to think all the thoughts and feel all the feelings associated with what we do, some of these horrors might not occur. In any event what is being done is bad enough, I must not be complicit in it by ignoring my thoughts and avoiding the feelings these disgusting activities elicit. Even if I sometimes can't sleep.
I imagine the anguish the mother cow is feeling at the dairy, where her child has been taken from her, after she was forcibly impregnated. Her baby is taken so all the milk the mother cow produces can go into yogurt, butter, ice cream and profit. The milk was for her baby not for humans. I think about how she must feel, about how any parent feels when they cannot care for their child. The pain and misery make the ice cream not so attractive.
I sometimes think of the chickens trapped in cages, with no room to turn or spread their wings and that have been there all the day long while I was going about my life. I think about their having been there the day before, and the day before that, and the day before that, sometimes for up to 2 years. This is their whole life, then they are thrown into another cage, trucked to a slaughterhouse and brutally killed. For an omelet, for an easter egg, for a "nugget", for money.
I do this and sometimes then cannot sleep. It is not that I couldn't not do it, most of us have developed strategies to avoid thinking uncomfortable thoughts, I do it because I believe it to be respectful to do so. To be abused, oppressed, tortured and then killed is horrific but for such a thing to occur and no one to think about it and feel bad about it is.....beyond words.
My thoughts are nothing to those beings enduring the obscene treatment being forced upon them by my species but for me to not think those thoughts, for me to push them away and not allow myself to feel pained and sorrowful...........then I too would somehow be a participant in the silent animal holocaust that continues every moment of every day.
It might be that if we humans would allow ourselves to think all the thoughts and feel all the feelings associated with what we do, some of these horrors might not occur. In any event what is being done is bad enough, I must not be complicit in it by ignoring my thoughts and avoiding the feelings these disgusting activities elicit. Even if I sometimes can't sleep.
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