Eggs, Milk, and Cheese

“No animal dies for a glass of milk or a slice of cheese, so what’s the problem?”

Eggs and milk are in everything, and I mean everything. And then there is cheese, which everyone loves and turns dishes from good to great. Oh, how I wish there was no animal suffering in the production of these products, but unfortunately, there is. And it’s not just a little suffering, it is a lot 😭

Weirdly, the dairy and egg industries are arguably more cruel than the meat industry. They don’t just end in slaughter but they require years of prolonged physical exploitation first.

Got Milk

I never thought about this, but milk is fucking crazy! I used to think cows just naturally produced milk all year round, but that is not the case at all. Cows are mammals, and like humans, they only produce milk when they are pregnant or have recently given birth.

To keep milk flowing continuously to meet our demands, dairy cows are artificially inseminated once a year. This creates a massive problem for the industry: what happens to all the babies?

• Step 1 - Remove baby calf from mother: The calf is removed so that their mother’s milk can be bottled and sold instead of feeding her child. This separation occurs mere hours after birth and causes extreme stress for both mother and baby. The pair will cry for each other, sometimes for days, and mothers have been known to walk for miles in search of their calf.
• Step 2 - Kill the newborn calves: For efficiency, male dairy calves (along with some excess females) are usually either sent to veal crates or killed on-farm within a few days of birth.
• Step 3 - Repeat until they break: The natural lifespan of a cow is approximately 20 years. In the dairy industry, she’ll be physically exhausted, lame, and infertile by just 4 to 5 years of age. No longer able to produce the quantity of milk demanded of her, she will be sent to slaughter and turned into cheap meat products like pies and dog food.

This feels like animal cruelty. Do we really need cow’s milk this badly? If someone can show me that we physically need milk to survive, or prove that calf separation and constant forced impregnation aren’t actually that bad, I’m all ears.

Can’t make an omelette without breaking a few eggs

We have selectively bred modern laying hens to produce roughly 300 eggs a year, compared to their wild ancestors who laid just 10 to 15. Pushing their bodies to create nearly an egg a day leads to severe calcium deficiencies, which in turn leads to osteoporosis and bone fractures.

• Male Chicks: On their very first day of life, billions of male chicks globally are killed because they aren’t the right breed to grow fast for meat (broiler chickens), and they obviously don’t lay eggs. The primary method of killing them in the industry is maceration (shredding them alive in an industrial grinder).
• The Laying Hens: Laying hens are slaughtered as soon as their egg production begins to dip, usually at around 18 months of age (despite a natural lifespan of 8 to 10 years).

The Conclusion

The production of milk and eggs takes a brutal toll on their bodies, and when they can’t physically work anymore, they are killed anyway. I guess this would be okay if they were unfeeling, biological machines. But they aren’t.

Eating eggs and dairy doesn’t avoid animal slaughter! It just adds a few years of exploitation before it happens.