news
Article Summary
• Subsidize plant-based food: Governments worldwide heavily subsidize animal food production, making it cheaper and more accessible. We can shift this focus to plant-based food, promoting sustainable agriculture and reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
• Address systemic oppression: Poverty, racism, and sexism intersect with animal exploitation. We must dismantle these oppressive structures, ensuring equal access to resources and opportunities for all.
• Recognize animal sentience: Non-human animals are sentient beings, capable of feeling pain, joy, and suffering. We must acknowledge their rights and interests, promoting veganism and reducing animal exploitation.
Key passage:
In terms of maternal health, the mother cows suffer from mastitis, a painful condition from which lactating people can also suffer. It’s possible for pus from the condition and other infections to pass into dairy milk. Dairy cows don’t get to die of old age on a lush green pasture, as the advertisements would have us believe. Once the dairy cows can no longer produce high volumes of milk, they’re slaughtered in the same slaughterhouses where cattle bred for beef are also killed.
The average lifespan of a dairy cow is four to six years, while their natural lifespan is between fifteen and twenty years. And before we think, “At least the cows had a life,” we need to consider both the continuous pain in their life and the fact we bred the cows into existence in the first place just to exploit them.
What’s the reason for these conditions? Simply so humans can drink the milk meant to nourish and grow a baby cow. We’re the only species feeding on another species’ mother’s milk and the only species continuing to consume milk after weaning when there’s no longer any nutritional need.
In the case of eggs, the cycle of exploitation is similar. Egg-laying chickens are selectively bred to lay many eggs well beyond the capacity and cycles of their fowl cousins in the wild. Once the eggs hatch, we gas or grind up male chicks alive, in a process called maceration, because they’re worthless to human use, as they can’t lay eggs.
For meat consumption, we selectively breed broiler chickens, creating monster-sized beasts so there is more meat to sell and an increase in profit margins. Chickens are slaughtered at mere months when their natural lifespan is between seven and eight years.
Read the full post at CounterPunch.
