In the reality of marketing, the Organic Happy Cow is a myth. A “spent” dairy cow who has been stunned with a captive bolt pistol which allegedly renders her unconscious in preparation for slaughter. Stunning is not a perfect science and some animals are still fully or semi conscious when slaughtered.
No matter how “humane” the marketers want to spin the truth, the modern dairy industry’s business model is built upon the exploitation of pregnant females, forcing them to birth lots of unwanted babies. Millions of dairy cows live tortured, miserable lives while making a significant contribution to greenhouse gases. The bucolic cow and family farm barely exist.
Organic cows must also be kept free from antibiotic use. Painful inflammation of the mammary glands, or mastitis, is common among cows raised for their milk, and it is one of dairy farms’ most frequently cited reasons for sending cows to slaughter.
ALL dairy cows, those who produce organic milk or not, those raised on pasture or on feed lots, and those raised on small independent farms or large factory farms end up in slaughterhouses. No farmer is going to keep an older, less-productive dairy cow alive when he could easily bring in a new, more productive cow in her place. Most cows decline in producing milk four and seven years old, an adolescent in a natural lifespan of 25 to 30 years. The spent cows are sent to slaughter if the decline in milk production which makes the cow no longer economically viable to keep alive. They may begin to show a common dairy herd diseases such as mastitis or bovine leukemia. They may simply be too weak.
Downer cows are an industry term for spent dairy cows who are too weak or sick to stand on their feet any longer. Some investigations of downer cows have documented on video cows being dragged by chains and prodded with electric prods to get them onto trucks to then transport them to slaughterhouses.
The downer cow issue really brings to light the extent to which these cows are simply viewed as commodities and how the meat and dairy industry and their powerful government allies will fight to legally defend even the most egregious abuses of farmed animals, especially when it means saving money. Small dairy farmers may adopt many of the inhumane practices of the mega dairies to compete.
Dairy cows are kept perpetually pregnant may go to slaughter while pregnant if they become unprofitable before giving birth. And so while workers stun them, hang them upside down, cut open their throats to let the blood from their body drain out, cut off their legs, and pull off their skin, all that time, there is a calf inside them, fighting and dying a horrifying death. The calf could still be dying but still living, still suffering terribly at the time of her mother's dismemberment and disembowelment. A large percentage of the slaughtered cows are pregnant.
The organic cow slaughtered body will be mixed with thousands of others to become the cheap meat for hamburger and pet food. Her hide, bones and cartilage will be used for leather clothing, accessories and upholstery, and used in such innocuous things like gelatin, chewy candies, marshmallows, asphalt, and construction-grade adhesives.
The udders of dairy cows can become extremely distended, the result of a short but intense life of excessive milk production, up to six times more than her body was designed by nature to produce. The calves, for whom the milk was perfectly formulated, got little or none of it.
All forms of dairy farming involve forcibly impregnating cows using a very invasive procedure that involves a constraining device and the insertion of semen through her rectum and vagina into her uterus. This involves a person inserting his arm far into the cow's rectum in order to position the uterus, and then forcing an instrument into her vagina. The restraining apparatus used is commonly called a “rape rack.”
All is done with no pain killer.
Newborn dairy calves are taken away from their mothers typically on day one, causing extreme separation anxiety for both newborn and mother, who carries her baby for 9 months like human mothers do. Mother cows have been known to wail and mourn the loss of their calves up to weeks on end. The typical dairy cow experiences this cycle of losing her baby at least four and up to seven times in her short life as a milk producer. It is worth noting here that in many studies animals choose physical pain over psychological pain when given a choice, suggesting that emotional pain is much harder to deal with.
There is no veal industry without the dairy industry. Veal farmers depend on dairy farmers to provide them with a steady supply of bovine babies. About half of all calves born are male with no use in milk production. They are sent to veal-producing operations or directly to auctions where they are sold and slaughtered when they are just a few days old. Male calves used for veal production suffer a crude castration process and are killed after 4 months spent in small crates or pens.
Organic and regular cow's milk is an unhealthy fluid from diseased animals that contains a wide range of dangerous and disease-causing substances that have a cumulative negative effect on all who consume it.
Organic and regular cow's milk have 59 active hormones, scores of allergens, fat and cholesterol. Most cow's milk has measurable quantities of herbicides, pesticides, dioxins (up to 200 times the safe levels), up to 53 powerful antibiotics, blood, pus, feces, bacteria and viruses. Cow's milk can have traces of anything the cow ate, including radioactive fallout strontium-90 from long ago nuclear testing. Organic milk contains less pesticides, no antibiotics, and no artificial growth hormones, but most organic dairy cows do not eat grass.
The organic cow grazes on organic pastures for the entire grazing season, which must be at least 120 days a year, and receives at least 30 percent of its nutrition from pasture during the grazing season. Organic livestock are required to have year round access to the outdoors and a total feed ration of agricultural products that are 100% organic.
So while it is given “access” to graze during that grazing season, the rules do not stipulate how often or how long those cows should be grazing outdoors. And based on the nutrition guidelines, the cows are still eating majority grains over grass.
Each day that an animal spends in the feedlot, its supply of omega-3s is diminished. The meat from the pastured cattle is higher in Vitamin E, beta carotene and Vitamin A and K2 vitamins than the meat from the feedlot cattle.
Organic farmer’s feed the cows grains due to economics. Grains help to make cows fatten up and produce more milk. On average, cows raised in confinement on grains produce more than three times as much milk as the family cow of days gone by and 15 times the amount required to raise a healthy calf. More milk from the cow equals less nutrients for those who consume it. The less milk a cow produces, the more vitamins in her milk.
Organic dairy cows are not healthy cows. Cows are meant to eat grass not grains. This means organic dairy farming is a very delicate system. In order to check milk quality there is system called ‘bulk tank somatic cell count’ which is used to detect bacteria levels usually indicating mastitis. This is basically testing for the amount of pus in milk.
Counts from 250,000-300,000 indicate mastitis. That is a lot of pus in milk, and is not removed from the milk when pasteurized.
Cows producing organic milk are not given antibiotics to treat or prevent mastitis. This is udder infections create puss and blood that goes directly into the milk. They don’t take the puss and blood out, they just pasteurize. The very sick cows are not removed until it's too late.
The pus and bacteria from the mastitis infection goes into the milk. The FDA allows 750 million pus cells in every liter of milk. That's about 30 million pus cells per mouthful of milk. EU only allows 400,000 cell/ml. This pus, similar to pimple zit, contains paratuberculosis bacteria. In regular milk, large doses of antibiotics does not help much and they inhibit the development of children's immune system. Organic milk cows are got given antibotics.
Why would you want to drink milk with 59 hormones and with enough white pus to mask out the red blood coming from a sick abused cow. Who wants to drink organic milk with zit?
Most Organic Milk is dead and requires no refrigeration. It is made to be able to sit on the counter for up to 9 months unopened before going bad due to a process called UHT. They don’t need to sell it in the refrigerated aisle but if people knew it could sit out then people won’t buy it. Currently 80% of organic milk is UHT pasteurized.
The official U.S. government definition of an ultra-pasteurized dairy product stipulates “such product shall have been thermally processed at or above 280° F for at least 2 seconds, either before or after packaging, so as to produce a product which has an extended shelf life.”
Not only do pasteurization and UHT processing kill off the enzymes present in milk needed to digest the casein, the casein itself is altered to the point of being indigestible!
NEXT Dairy is loaded with sex hormones