Animals’ use-by date

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Once we feel safe to exploit, separation has already taken place, essential if we want to farm animals. It’s essential with humans too - if we ‘use’ people, we must first practise separation on them ... then we can put them in their place.
Once we’ve made up our minds who is superior and who is inferior, all we have to do is simply withhold friendly feelings, then everything’s so much easier. A dependent employee, for instance, in fear of losing her job, doesn’t need to be befriended by the employer who, from a superior power base, can push her to her limits.
Much the same thing happens on farms with animals, only much worse – a farmer, by having biological control over the animals, can feed them and breed them at will. Animals pull carts, produce eggs, they fatten, they reproduce and earn farmers money. Then ... then they can be liquidated. It’s the same, often, with companion animals who’re ‘put to sleep’ when vet bills get too high.
Determining the fate of animals is what humans do to underline our superiority and their inferiority. Inferiority, low standards and less sentience equates to us justifying being pragmatic ... about things like ‘use-by-dates’ - unproductive human slaves were never allowed to slip into retirement but were extinguished as redundant property. It’s exactly the same with animal slaves.
‘Food animals’ are owned, they’re the property of someone. They’re objects. They’re not irreplaceable, sovereign, individual living beings. They’re slaves, and ‘put here’ for us ... to do with them as we please. They are the spoils of the species wars. They’re benefits accrueing to the dominant species ... thus we, the human masters, dictate the entire fate and current existence of ... the milking cow, for example.
She is artificially inseminated to produce calves, and often these calves serve their only real purpose ... in embryo. Humans learnt that handy piece of biology long ago.
Before they’re born the foetus’ presence in the womb triggers high lactation in the mother cow, thus releasing delicious quantities of highly profitable MILK. The cow is powerless to stop her calf being born (...and then disposed of) or in fact any other of her biological functions. What a ‘convenience store’ this has been for humans. And now she is made into a machine.
She lactates and gives birth all her life. Normally dying around 20 years of age, she’s ‘put down’ at about half that age as a dairy cow. She’s too exhausted by constant pregnancies and milking to live much longer and, more importantly, she’s no longer economically viable to the farmer. (She can’t earn her board and keep). She warrants no more life.
The human decision is that cold.
The cow bonanza is just one of many other farm-animal bonanzas, from which the owner benefits - not just from the sale of the animal’s carcass but from co-products like leather or various by-products (like milk and eggs) taken from her while alive. Animals make ideal slaves. They don’t complain and they don’t fight back. There’s no need to make friends with them, any more than there is for bosses with employees.
Humans have learnt how to ‘do’ separation. We do it so routinely with animals that our normal behaviour with one another or the normal standards of care we show to companions animals is thought not-to-be-necessary for ‘those other’ animals.