Jan 18 2009
Animal cruelty stories across the nation…and why not to drink Milk
As always, this past week has seen a number of animal cruelty stories across these United States - here are only a few of them:
Ripley, Mississippi - Nellie Bracken and Margaret Payne are to be charged with 15 counts of animal cruelty and neglect. After a neighbor reported two dogs left in a minivan on their property for several days, police showed up to find a number of dogs and a cat in a trailer and on the property, dying of thirst and hunger.
Suffolk, Virginia - Snowball, a tethered dog, died after receiving a laceration to its neck. Also, a dog was taken into the woods, shot, and killed.
Albany, New York - A man left his dog outside in the extreme cold without food, water, or heat. The dog is not expected to live.
Laurel Hill, Florida - A man arrested for driving his car over a family’s dog will stand trial. In July 2007 he drove his vehicle over the family’s pet, shut off the vehicle, restarted it and drove over the dog again.
Johnston, Pennsylvania - A dog was found wandering the streets on new year’s eve with third degree burns over 30% of its body, including his head and neck. The owner, Erik Licht, said the dog’s bandana caught on fire and he tried to put it out by throwing his drink, which contained rum, amaretto, and vodka, on the dog. He said he was not able to afford a vet, so he just set the dog loose.
When this is how we treat “cute” animals, how do we treat the rest? Mostly as machines. Take, for instance, milk. While all mammals produce milk, we normally use the general term to specifically refer to cow’s milk. First off, there is absolutely nothing natural about drinking another species’ milk, which is intended solely for its offspring. Humans are the only ones that do it. Can you imagine another species drinking human milk?
Dairy cows on factory farms are essentially treated as machines. It has become commonplace to force dairy cows to produce 100 pounds of milk a day - ten times higher than they’d ever produce naturally. They are often artificially inseminated every year to keep the milk coming, and pumped full of growth hormones.
Over milking is painful to the animals and leads to infections, which leads to overuse of antibiotics, which can get into milk, along with blood and pus from infected utters. Delicious.
The only natural milk for humans to drink is human milk. Somehow I don’t think your mother is up for that anymore.
I’ve actually started to grow fond of soymilk. It tastes like cereal milk to me lol - which makes it that much better in cereal.
Nice! Soymilk is good stuff. Rice milk is okay, but usually too thin for me. I’m told almond milk is good, but I’m allergic to nuts, so have never tried it.
Actually, I think my favorite is hemp milk. It is not as easy to find and is more expensive, but it has a good taste and is full of good stuff that makes the body happy.
mmm hemp is full of good stuff that makes the body happy. As mad as I am that pot isn’t legal, i’m even more mad that hemp in total isn’t. There’s so many uses for it!
While I do not condone the cruel raising of cows (factory farming, confinement, overmilking, etc), many farms still raise bovines in free range and natural environment. You may quell about how wrong we are in taking milk that is not of our species and killing thousands of cows, but how do you factor into that argument that it is our non-vegetarian practices that have given lives to countless more cows, pigs, chickens etc than there would ever be without us?
do you really not see how ridiculous that argument is? What is the point of giving life if you are doing it only with the intention of slaughtering it?
There is nothing natural and nothing nutritionally necessary about drinking cow’s milk. Just like humans, it is meant for their offspring when they are babies. They do not feed their offspring milk after they have matured. Likewise, humans feed their babies human milk only when they are babies. The only milk natural to humans is human milk - would you drink your mother’s milk today? Or if a mother, continue to feed it to your child long after they are grown?
Sounds ridiculous, right?
Well what is the difference between that and what we do with cow’s milk?