Process a cow goes through in slaughterhouse

Even if you don't eat meat, you might think a vegetarian diet includes drinking or using milk. We all have photos of farmers pumping milk by hand and it seems to be a natural part of life and a cow's friendly use. But we really don't think a lot about this at all, do we?

Do you know how life lives a cow raised to produce milk? A milk cow lives in cramped and often filthy conditions, just like most animals used for mass consumption. Hormones are fed to stimulate their reproductive processes, because that's what a mother's milk is for-to feed her baby. However, as soon as a calf is born it is taken from her mother. A male calf often goes to a terrible destiny to be raised for veal; a female calf often has the same destiny as his mom.

The cows often grumble over their babies. For them they will be seen bellowing and searching for them. Mass producing human milk has disrupted the natural order of things.

To continue stimulating milk production the cows are fed hormones. Painful to the cow's udders are the electric pumps. With activation of the hormone, cows are induced to produce 10 times as much milk as they usually would.

When their dairy-producing days are over, they butcher the cows for ground beef. All of these cows also need huge natural resources to feed and water. To sustain that enormous industry, the water table is being depleted. And the waste that all those large animals produce has a detrimental effect on the environment.

After a certain age we do not really need to consume milk. Why will we continue to help this animal-stricken industry? Humans are not meant to drink cow's milk to really top it off. Calf's are meant to drink cow's milk and we humans are expected to drink human milk. Our bodies were not designed to digest cow milk proteins-so why bother? Especially when a green, leafy vegetable can give you more calcium?