How do we get milk? Don’t just say ‘from cows’! Would it surprise you to learn that the only reason we get cow’s milk is because the cow has had a calf – just as the only reason a woman produces milk is because she’s had a baby? The big difference is that we don’t take the baby away from the woman and use her milk in our tea. But that’s what we do to dairy cows and we do it every year for as long as they live.

Wouldn’t it be nice, though, if a cow produced enough milk to feed her calf and still had enough left over for us to drink and make into cheese, yoghurt, ice cream, butter and all the other things we make from milk? Guess what – she does! The poor dairy cow has been so selectively bred over the years that she now gives ten times as much as her calf could ever drink. But we still take the calf away after only 24 hours so we can have it all – up to 10,000 litres of it from each cow every year.

Once you’ve seen a mother cow staring after her newborn little calf in panic as it’s led away to a shed, never to be seen by her again; once you have heard her bellows of grief at its loss, it’s very hard to look at the dairy industry in the same way. But this is only the start of the story for dairy cows, which are probably the hardest working, most abused of all farm animals. The reason they don’t get much sympathy is because their problems aren’t easy to see – in fact dairy cows appear quite happy. It all seems so nice and peaceful as they quietly munch away at the grass or lie in the sunshine chewing the cud, (they bring their food back up and chew it again which is one reason why they can digest grass and we can’t). But next time you’re near a field of them – they’re usually the black and white ones called Friesians – take a closer look.

Look at their udders. These milk-producing organs are far bigger that they every are in wild cows. If you watch you’ll see how they often affect the way the cows walk, the size forcing their legs apart. This unnatural way of walking causes damage to the feet, making many cows limp. Their foot problems are made worse by the hard concrete floors of the sheds in which they’re kept over winter. Cow’s hooves aren’t designed to stand on concrete for months on end.

As a result, cows suffer from a disease called laminitis – an inflamation of the membranes on the inside of the hoof. Does it hurt? Professor John Webster, head of the animal husbandry department at Bristol University, isn’t in any doubt. He says that studying the feet of slaughtered cows shows that nearly 100 per cent of them have this crippling disease. He says ‘To understand the pain of laminitis caused by foot damage it helps to imagine crushing all your fingernails in the door then standing on your fingertips.’ For cows with extreme laminitis there is no cure and they are destroyed.
But dairy cows have other problems too. If you look at their rear ends, you’ll see that their bones stick through the skin. It often looks like a piece of thin material that’s been thrown over a coat hanger. This is because a dairy cow is either giving milk, carrying a calf or doing both things at the same time. Not only does she produce a massive quantity of milk for nine months after the birth of her calf, but for most of that time she is pregnant with her next calf, and has to provide nourishment for the new calf inside her. Her only break is during the last three months of her pregnancy when the farmer stops milking her so that all her strength can go to help build her growing calf. Because a dairy cow gives birth every year, this punishing routine never stops.

Wild cows produce only enough milk for their calf – about one-tenth the amount produced by dairy cows – and as a result they have tiny udders. Nor do they become pregnant while they’re still feeding their calf, as this would rob them of nearly all their energy and jeopardise their survival. In contrast, a dairy cow uses up so much energy she is usually badly nourished, hungry and exhausted. The cow’s huge output of milk puts an unnatural strain on her udders and in about one-third of cows, these become inflamed and infected. This painful disease is called mastisis and results in thick pus oozing out of the cow’s teats.

After giving birth just two or three times, the tissues in a dairy cow’s body start to break down from overwork and poor nutrition. This why dairy cows are killed when they’re between four and seven years old, even though they could live to be 20 or more. It’s like a girl being completely physically worn out while she’s still a teenager.

None of this happens to the cows used to breed beef cattle. They’re not milked for humans and so produce just the right amount of milk for their calves. Like wild cows, they have tiny udders, not the huge things you see on dairy cows, which means their bodies can absorb all the nutrients they need.

You might expect producers would look at exhausted dairy cows and say it was time to give them a rest. No chance! Dairy corporations are experimenting with a hormone called BST (bovine somatotropin) which will make cows give even more milk – as much as 40 per cent more. Through selective breeding, they’re producing new types of cow which will give twice as much milk again. It seems you just can’t satisfy greed!

And what happens to the worn-out dairy cows? They’re sent to the slaughterhouse and killed for ‘low grade’ meat products like hamburgers, pies, stock cubes and, again, school dinners!

Humans are the only species on the planet that drink another animal’s milk, so what happens to the calves? Not one of the one million or so calves born to dairy cows in Britain each year ever see their mothers again after the first day or two. About 330,000 female calves are kept to replace their worn-out mothers who are killed. Some of the heftier looking calves are kept and allowed to grow into beef cattle. But the majority, about 450,000 every year, are sent to market at just a few days old, before they can even eat solid food or drink without sucking from a teat. They’re destined to become veal calves.

In Britain, these animals are usually bought by special dealers who send them abroad to France, Holland and Denmark. The calves are crammed together in big lorries and when they reach their new homes, it’s not green fields they find but a darkened wooden box with slats to stand on – a crate so small they can’t even lie down properly or turn round. No bedding, no companionship, just darkness and torment.

The whole purpose of this crate system is to keep the calves as cheaply as possible. It’s also designed to make them anaemic – lacking in iron – so their flesh will stay baby-white. This means they never see daylight and never chew grass or hay (as they would naturally do) because both these things would turn their flesh from white to pink, the colour it is meant to be. Instead, the calves are given a non-stop diet of milk and water with no solid nourishment of any kind. The animals will lick their crates or swallow their own hair, so desperate are they for something satisfying. Offer them your fingers and they will suck them greedily, as much for comfort as anything else.

After 22 weeks of this misery, the calves are taken from their crates and killed. For what? White veal for the ‘gourmet’s’ dinner table in posh restaurants. Even though the crates are illegal in Britain, it’s perfectly okay to send the calves abroad and then important their meat – which just shows how people can side-step the law to their own advantage.

Campaigning groups all over Europe have lobbied to extend the ban on veal crates from the UK to include all EU countries. Agricultural ministers from the European Union have accepted recommendations to phase out crates in the year 2008. This is a positive step but even once crates are abolished, calves will still be separated from their mums at one day old. They will still be kept anaemic and will never feel the sun or be able to graze; and they will still only have a tiny 1.2m space in which to stand – and may still not be given any bedding. The only real difference is that at a few weeks old they will be moved from being kept alone into a crammed pen with other calves.

So what about the calves that are kept for beef? In Britain, like almost everywhere else in the world, beef comes from castrated male cattle called bullocks or steers. Some beef cattle come from dairy cows and these herds grow up together, often being allowed to graze on open fields. Increasingly, however, these calves are moved into crowded sheds when they’re about a year old, and fed a high-protein diet to make them grow more quickly.

In the USA, few beef cattle are ever seen wandering around as they do in the movies because they’re mostly crammed together in feed lots – big, open-air pens. Americans, followed closely by Australians, eat more beef than any other nation and 100,000 cattle are slaughtered every 24 hours. So much beef is consumed in the USA that there isn’t enough land to graze all the cattle on which is why they’re penned up. It’s easier to bring the food and water to them and there can be hundreds, often thousands of cattle, in each pen. It’s just another kind of factory farming.

The steer have very little space to move around in, and stand in their own mess for a year or more, living on high-protein food that makes them put on weight quickly. Once again, the animals are fed high levels of antibiotics and other chemicals to ward off the diseases caused by overcrowding. This system of beef production was introduced in Britain in 1987.

There are other ways of growing beef cattle and the kindest method is by using ‘suckler’ herds. Calves are allowed to stay with their mothers until they’re about two years old, and before they start eating grass they can suckle as much as they like. Animals in these herds are able to interact as they would in the wild and to some extent behave in the way that herds of cattle do naturally. Well, until the young bullocks are taken away and killed that is!

A huge beast as heavy and powerful as cow could cause real havoc to humans if it wanted to, but it doesn’t. Instead, it pays a terrible price for being so docile. We take its young away from it and literally milk it dry. Producers have turned the cow into a milk or meat machine – which is strange, as we don’t need either.

‘Eating veal is inexcusable.’
Gaby Roslin, TV presenter