The cow

Humans will manipulate anything to gain personal advantage. We exploit resources to strengthen and protect ourselves, and especially when there’s no danger in it for us (like using animals in captivity). Our advantage-taking pragmatism lets us dream up systems, which we then put into practice. Animal farming is the classic example, where we subject animals to slavery, so that our food and clothing supplies are available on tap. And whole livelihoods can be provided for, by putting animals to work for us. And we do it to them because we can, because there are no negative repercussions. (Or so we think!)
Take the cow for instance. She is the victim of theft and assault on a daily basis. Her fate is in the hands of humans who want her milk and who use force to get it, to get 20-40 litres a day from her. The new born is pushed aside so that we can get the milk intended for the calf. We steal it for ourselves and we’ve always done it and now we hardly notice it, and we certainly don’t feel any compunction to stop it.
On the farm, the calf is got rid of as quickly as possible, having served its chief purpose in embryo. As a foetus, having stimulated its mother’s mammary glands, it’s no longer useful to keep it alive. Often calves are shot on day one. One or two calves (of the five or six born to a cow) are sent to ‘calf prison’ until they’re ready for dairy duties or for fattening purposes.
It’s a sad thought that we abuse such a peaceful creature. Anthropomorphically, we can guess that both cow and calf are unhappy about all this. But the whole thing is still legal, so there’s not much anyone can do about it. The milk is drunk, the profits made and the cow enslaved. Are we unhappy about this? Ashamed? Not exactly, because most people have never even thought about it, or if they have they’ve chosen to ignore it. Humans have been nicely brainwashed, our desensitisation reaching the point where considering the rights and wrongs of dairy farming has never entered our heads.