Animals that are used for food

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I’d like to go back to basics for the next series of blogs, to recap on some of the reasons why we shouldn’t be using animals for food. This is at the heart of veganism and the whole boycotting of any industry that uses animals for any useful purpose at all. Humans have gradually realised that animals can be profited from and that there are no constraints on exploiting them - the general public will not complain as long as the producers give them what they want. Competition for market share has led the ‘Industry’ to lay aside welfare considerations in order to produce food and clothing at the lowest price possible. Animal suffering is no longer considered. I’m mainly concentrating on the food industry here - where animals are used for food.

My reaction to this subject - animals being used for food - is to simply say it’s inhumane to keep animals, kill them, butcher their bodies and eat them! The very idea of denying animals their freedom, keeping them in slum conditions then, on their execution day, hanging them upside down to bleed to death, is obscene. But if cruel and callous things can be done to entirely innocent animals like cows, steers, pigs and sheep, how much worse it seems for the very young, the six week old pullets, piglets, calves and lambs - the children of the animal world.

            The sheer horror of what is happening on a mass scale all around the world to animals makes me (and many others like me) want to try to change peoples’ attitudes by pointing out some of the terrible things done to them both at the farm and the abattoir. Most people, however, seem reluctant to think too deeply about it - “Ho hum” they say and “All very sad, but that’s just the way things are. We humans have been eating animals for a million years. We aren’t likely to change now!!”.

But we are changing, especially here in Western nations where we are better informed about animal exploitation. We’re changing, mainly because the shame is too great to bear. In 1944 the first Vegan publication put it this way. “The great impediment to man’s moral development may be that he is a parasite on lower forms of animal life”. Since the 1940’s, when some people started to eat solely from plant-based foods - without becoming ill - there was for the first time in human history a safe way out of our dependency on animals for food. A vegan regime was shown to be nutritionally healthy. From then on, we were able to look ahead to a time when the use of animal products (such as meat, dairy, eggs, leather and wool) would be viewed as an inhumane and unsustainable practice from a much less enlightened age.

Vegetarians stop eating animals for both health and ethical reasons and certainly they make a strong statement to their meat-eating friends. But not all exploited animals are reared for meat. It’s debatable, for instance, as to which suffers most, the dairy cow or the beef steer. Each is held captive, denied any sort of natural life and ultimately ends his/her life at the abattoir. But the dairy cow suffers in so many other ways. The same comparison applies between egg-laying hens and chickens reared for meat. The milk or egg by-product-producing animals often suffer more than ‘meat’ animals.

            Once again, quoting from that first vegan publication - “Lacto-vegetarianism is but a half-way house between flesh eating and a truly humane, civilized diet ... we should try to evolve sufficiently to make the full journey”. Vegetarianism is often as far as many people will go, not wishing to look deeper in case they find out more than they’d bargained for. They don’t want to put milk and egg production in the same category of cruelty as they do meat. If they did, they’d logically have to become vegan. Milk, for example, is a product involving animal cruelty. It is also a dangerously misrepresented substance - promoted as a good supply of calcium whereas in reality it has the opposite effect. It leaches calcium from the bones. But milk is a problem on another level because it turns up as an ingredient in so many popular food items and for this reason it’s unlikely that users of milk will want to know the details of how it is produced for fear of their having to black-list milk products. They stick with the line that “if cows weren’t milked they’d die” (which is quite true as far as it goes) but the rest of the story they’d prefer to ignore. The biological details of milk production go something like this:

A cow’s biology determines the quantity of milk she produces and whilst it’s normally too little to be of much interest, when she’s pregnant, she makes lots of it. Once impregnated and after giving birth to a calf, her mammary glands go into over-drive. The calf, having served its main purpose in uteri, is often then regarded as a dispensable item and killed just after birth to allow the huge quantities of its mother’s milk to be diverted for human consumption. With continuous impregnation (calf bearing) subsequent loss of calves plus constant milking, she is soon exhausted and her milk yield so low that she’s no longer economically viable. She will live only ten of her normally twenty years before being sent for slaughter. That’s all the thanks she gets for producing vast quantities of milk for the farmers and their milk-drinking customers! It’s an ugly story that omnivores don’t enjoy hearing.

I suspect most so called ‘animal welfare’ organisations don’t want to hear this since it would oblige them to speak out against the egg and dairy industries. They concentrate on factory farming and meat eating, and they promote vegetarianism in order to win substantial support from the general public. They don’t dare to speak out against the broader welfare issues for fear of losing the support of milk drinkers and egg eaters and the users of the many thousands of commercial foodstuffs loaded with these products.