The lives of cows farmed for dairy
Dairy products such as milk, butter, cheese, yogurt, and ice cream are widely enjoyed and commonly used in many recipes. Currently, the average American consumes 655 pounds of dairy per year. To meet this demand, the United States alone raises over 9.36 million cows. That’s a lot of dairy and a lot of cows! Despite this, many of us know little about cows or how we farm their milk.
This post explores the typical lives of cows farmed for dairy in the US, including:
Why cows produce milk
What happens to male dairy cows
How we house dairy cows
What happens to dairy cows when they stop producing milk
Selective breeding
Like all female mammals, female cows produce milk to feed their newborns. They only produce milk when they’re pregnant or nursing.
Naturally, cows aren't better at producing milk than other mammals. (If we felt up to it, we could farm mice, dogs, blue whales, or any other mammal for dairy.) However, over time we have selectively bred cows farmed for dairy to produce more and more milk. They can now produce up to 10 times more milk than their wild ancestors.
Birth and separation
Within a few hours of giving birth, we permanently separate mother cows from their calves so that the calves do not consume the milk that we want to buy and sell.
Mother cows form strong and immediate emotional bonds with their calves. After we separate them, both show signs of distress, like bellowing, pacing, and searching for each other. Mother cows who have previously given birth and had their calves taken away sometimes try to hide their newborns so that they are not also taken away.
Newborn calves are raised in individual hutches or pens so that humans can take their milk.
If the calf is female, we keep her for her potential as a future milk producer. We house her in an individual pen or “hutch” and feed her milk replacer.
If the calf is male, we consider him a waste product since he can never produce milk and is not profitable for meat (as we selectively breed cows farmed for meat to grow more muscle). So, we either slaughter him immediately, sell him at an auction, or raise him on a veal farm. If the latter, we confine him in a small isolated crate that restricts his movement. We feed him a low-iron diet that makes his flesh the light pink color that we want, but it upsets his stomach. When he’s three or four months old, we slaughter him and sell him as veal.
Artificial insemination
About 10 months after giving birth, the mother cows’ milk supply decreases. To keep their milk supply high so that we can maximize our profits, we artificially impregnate them each year. This means that we restrain them, then put one of our arms into their rectum to hold their cervix in place while we use our free hand to insert a long metal rod into their vagina, piercing through their cervix and uterus, where we inject a bull’s semen. This is an uncomfortable procedure but we don’t provide any pain relief.
A worker artificially inseminates a restrained cow.
To collect bulls’ semen, we have bulls ejaculate into an artificial vagina or put an electric probe in their rectum and shock their pelvic nerves until they ejaculate.
Adolescence
Cows’ ancestors lived outside in forests and grasslands and spent their time gazing, resting, and socializing. For convenience and cost savings, we house mother cows inside of an industrial barn with hundreds or thousands of other cows. We often restrain them with chains or “ties” to one stall, giving them little or no access to pasture. They may spend their entire life standing or lying on a concrete floor, which puts stress on their joints, causing swelling, sores, and lameness.
Left: Cows sit in their individual stalls. Right: Cows being ushered into the milking parlor.
Unable to graze, we feed mother cows a high-protein diet that increases their milk supply but gives them digestive problems.
We milk mother cows twice or three times per day. To feed their calf, mother cows need to produce only 1 gallon of milk each day. With the help of electronic milking machines, we collect more than 7.5 gallons of milk per mother cow each day. This taxes their body and emaciates them. About one-third of them have mastitis, which is an inflammatory condition affecting the udders, typically caused by bacterial infection and resulting in swelling, pain, and milk contamination.
Cows are milked 2-3 times per day by milking machines.
Cows have a natural lifespan of 20 years, and mother cows are capable of producing milk for eight or nine years. However, in factory farms, their milk production typically starts to decline at around five or six years of age due to the stressful living conditions, inadequate treatment, and unaddressed health issues. As a result, they become less profitable to us, and we choose to send them to slaughter and replace them with their daughters.
Transport and slaughter
To transport the cows to a slaughterhouse, we pack them into a large truck, without giving them space to lie down, or access to water, food, or rest during the journey, which can last many hours or multiple days.
A cow looks out from a transport truck.
An injured dairy cow looks up from the floor of a transport truck arriving at a slaughterhouse.
Dairy cows are often still lactating when they’re sent to slaughter.
Upon their arrival at the slaughterhouse, the cows might be too injured, sick, exhausted, or frightened to exit the truck. We compel them off the truck and onto an assembly line by dragging them with ropes, shocking them with electric prods, using physical force, or yelling at them.
On the assembly line, we start by stunning the cows. This involves shooting them in the head with a captive bolt gun, which discharges a bolt or rod into their brain to reduce their sensitivity to pain. Subsequently, we shackle or hook one of their hind legs and suspend them to mechanically move them through the processing line. We then slit their throat and dismember them one piece at a time. Due to the rapid pace of the assembly line, we don’t always manage to stun the cows properly, leaving them fully conscious while we dismember them. Some of the cows are pregnant.
How to help
Although we may not directly participate in or endorse these actions towards cows, we fund and perpetuate these practices every time we purchase factory-farmed dairy products.
To improve the lives of cows farmed for dairy, we simply need to adjust our purchasing habits. We can either:
Commit to purchasing dairy only from farms that treat cows well. Yet, because 99% of dairy products come from factory farms in the United States, achieving this goal often requires additional research, effort, and money. (Generally, these products are not sold in grocery stores or restaurants.)
Abstain from dairy altogether. After all, a cow's milk is intended for her newborn calf, not for humans. Like all mammals, once we finish nursing from our own mother, we can obtain all the necessary nutrients from whole foods. Today, it's easier than ever to live dairy-free. If this is something you're considering, read our post 7 Tips for Going Dairy-Free.
Every day and every meal, we have the chance to live out our values. If animal welfare is one of your values, choose compassion with every purchase and every bite.
