What? No more meat, or milk, or eggs?

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For those people who find giving up animal products difficult to contemplate there is a dilemma. To stop eating meat but continuing eating cheese doesn’t mean we lead a cruelty-free life. The thousands of products on the market, making use of milk and eggs, perpetuates the dairy and egg industry. And a cruel business it is, for the animals concerned. Imagine a biscuit – one of the ‘essential’ ingredients is egg, laid by a caged bird (biscuit manufacturers don’t use free-range eggs!). If there’s milk involved in the recipe that won’t be a plant-based milk but milk from the cow. And she has her milk mechanically sucked out of her udder, milk which should be feeding her calf (the calf usually having to be got rid of). That very simply is the situation for all egg-milk producers. Lacto-ovo vegetarians stop eating animals for both health and ethical reasons and certainly they do far more for farm animals than their meat-eating friends. But because not all exploited animals are reared for meat, it is debatable as to which suffers most, the dairy cow or the beef steer. Each is held captive, denied any sort of natural life and ultimately has his/her life brutally terminated at the abattoir. The same comparison applies between egg-laying hens and chickens reared for meat, they each live in confinement and each die a terrible death. The milk or egg producing animals often suffer more than ‘meat’ animals.