.......Most people believe that cows need to be milked and that they’d suffer if they weren’t, but cows weren’t created by humans or for humans. Before we started to exploit them, their biological system took care of itself; it’s only now that humans are interfering with nature that suffering is being caused. Cows give milk to feed their young: on dairy farms, they’re kept constantly pregnant by artificial insemination. After calving, milk production lasts for up to 10 months, when they’re impregnated again, and the cycle continues, over and over, resulting in a knackered animal good only for slaughter, and, naturally, money in the bank for the dairy industry. Cows no more need to be milked than they need to be pumped full of synthetic growth hormones, antibiotics, appetite stimulants and assorted chemicals to increase milk production and facilitate ‘intensive’ (i.e. inhumane, greed-driven) farming, then over-milked for as long as is financially viable. Up to 25% of the dairy herd develop mastitis, an agonizing infection of the udder which causes inflammation and swelling. The udder gets rigid and hot and secretes infected discharge. The joints in the back legs swell and in pregnant cows the foetus is often damaged or miscarried. In case you’re wondering what happens to the calves of dairy cows if their milk supply is being taken - don’t worry, they don’t need milk: it spoils their flavour. All calves are separated from their mothers within a few days of birth. The male calves are put in tiny veal crates, with no room to even lie down comfortably, let alone turn around, and insufficient food – they often resort to licking their own urine off the boards of the crates to try to get nutrition. What food they do get is iron-deficient, to keep their flesh pale and pleasing to the eye of the discerning consumer. The female calves follow their mothers into the dairy industry.
.......In the slaughterhouse, animals are stunned with electrical implements before having their throats cut. Unfortunately, the effect of the stunning often wears off before the throat is slit and the animal is conscious as the knife severs the veins and arteries in the throat and the blood drains out. Bolt stunning is also used for larger animals. A bolt is shot through the skull to pulverize part of the brain, and this practice has also been recognised as quite inadequate. Sometimes this farcical stunning process is bypassed altogether and the throat is simply slit while the animal is fully conscious. Animals are beaten, poked in the eyes, anus or vulva, herded into too-small pens where injury is a certainty, and tormented by cruel handlers. Living pigs are often slung into scalding water and cows skinned alive. Animals are transported in metal trucks in stifling, overcrowded, uncomfortable and unsafe conditions, suffering from motion stress, hunger, thirst, pain, and exhaustion. Dead animals are left on trucks with live ones. Fallen animals too badly injured to move despite goading and beating by stockyard workers are known in the meat industry as 'downers'. They're hitched to the back of a van or pickup truck, dragged to a designated area and left for dead, piled one on top of the other, until someone gets around to putting them out of their misery.
.......Beef cattle are fed chicken faeces, offal, large amounts of fodder crops (while third-world countries starve) and even sawdust to get them up to satisfactory weight. They undergo castration, ear-tagging, branding and de-horning without anaesthesia. In transition year I work-shadowed a vet at a not very busy time of the farming year. Most of the work he did for the two weeks I was there was taking blood tests and dehorning cattle. Dehorning involved clipping one crocodile clip to the animal’s tail and another to its mouth. The clips were linked up to an antique, blood-spattered electrical device that when turned on made a loud whirring noise. The cow’s eyeballs would roll back in its head as it snorted and jerked, low-pitched groans escaping from its mouth. The vet then took a hacksaw and sawed the horns of the cattle off near to the skull. Blood spurted from the severed arteries in the stumps of the horns – these arteries then had to be dug out of the pulpy mess where the horn used to be and pinched shut with a scissors. The cow would then be released, spitting foam from its mouth, bucking and spluttering in a disturbed manner. A couple of times one of the crocodile clips fell off during the dehorning and the animal would struggle to get away. To prevent this, animals to be ‘skulled’ were lined up in passages between a steel rail and a wall, with other cows driven tightly up behind it to keep it from moving backwards. The more troublesome cows backed up anyway, some even managing to get themselves halfway up over the head and onto the back of the animal behind them; that’s when they weren’t crapping all over each other’s heads. One bullock (in a stunning display of athletic skill) did a crazy simultaneous twisty jumpy thing and got out from a very tight space and half way over a wall at least two feet higher than him. The vet himself disapproved strongly of the practice and said it was ‘barbaric’ (see, it’s not just loony animal lib rhetoric): animals are supposed to be dehorned when they’re very young and it can be done relatively painlessly by burning the undeveloped horns. Other nice things I saw included a cow with a prolapsed uterus which was sewn up with a huge blunt needle and what looked like knicker elastic, and cattle sliding panickedly round in their own shit in filthy farmyards with stumpy culchies roaring at them and thwacking them with sticks. When the dehorning was finished the cattle were herded back into their dark, stinking sheds scattered with mouldy hay.The farms I’ve described aren’t intensive operations: in fact, those cattle are probably in some of the best situations in Europe. It only goes downhill from there. Pigs on factory farms are penned into tiny stalls barely large enough to accommodate them. Pig farmers spend as little time as possible in the pig-housing buildings (only a few minutes a day) because of the incredibly strong stench of ammonia. Even this short daily period spent in the breeding sheds results in a high level of respiratory problems among pig farmers, including bronchitis, inflammation of the sinuses (very painful and uncomfortable) and asthma-like symptoms. Like dairy cows, a sow is constantly pregnant or nursing, tethered into a cramped, cold, narrow stall, unable to turn around, even to take care of her piglets for the short time they remain with her. Before the piglets are as much as properly able to stand they’re removed from their mother’s stall and placed in a cold steel compartment of their own, frightened and disorientated. Pigs are naturally placid and good-natured but revert to tail biting and cannibalism under the stressful, overcrowded conditions on farms. When pigs go to the slaughter, metal hooks are poked into their eyes, mouths, or rectums by impatient abattoir workers to make them move more quickly, as lack of exercise has made their limbs all but useless.
.......Hens in the laying industry are kept in tiny steel cages with slanted floors which cause severe discomfort and foot deformation. Their beaks are seared off with red-hot blades to prevent mutilation of themselves and other birds. When a hen’s egg production declines it’s either slaughtered or deprived of food and water for days to force unnatural moulting and shock it into another laying cycle. Chicks born into the layer hen industry are sorted at birth. The females are reinvested into the business, and the males are disposed of as they can’t lay and are not the right breed for meat. In Ireland, around 1 million day old male chicks are either gassed with carbon dioxide or minced alive in a grinding machine each year. The minced chicks are sometimes used as fertiliser.
.......Most present-day farmland is devoted to the cultivation of fodder-crops for beef and dairy cattle. Land is made available for this by keeping cattle indoors most or all of the year and stall-feeding them. Beef cattle are put on rich pasture for a short period before slaughter to fatten them for the market; in Ireland most cattle are trucked to the ‘Golden Vale’ of Kildare for their last meal. Far from recognising the inhumanity of intensive farming, the EU actually promotes it and provides incentives to farmers to ‘streamline’ their operations. Not only are the animals worse off, but small, traditional farms are forced out of the marketplace by prices they can’t compete with. Intensive farming is glorified in geography textbooks as the would-be saviour of all failing rural economies, if only the ‘stubborn, conservative’ farmers in peripheral regions would stop being so damn awkward and hop on the profiteers’ bandwagon. The status of farm animals is reduced to that of products; raw materials to be manipulated and exploited to best serve humans. The traditional values of rural farmers are trivialised, and land which has belonged to generations of a family becomes merely a resource to be milked for all it’s worth (no pun intended). You might be wondering why I’m defending any kind of farming since I’m against animal exploitation, but at least the traditional ways involved respect for balance with nature. As long as these mercenary, profit-driven values continue to be promoted by governments and in schools, this disgusting and offensive status quo can only continue to prevail.

Figures obtained from the VeganSociety.com and PETA.org websites.