Living a Buddhist Life: Vegetarianism by Bodhipaksa

A cow’s natural life expectancy is twenty years - fairly long for an animal - but most won’t live beyond four. The demands placed upon their bodies, draining milk at a rate which nature never intended, will typically leave them spent by their fourth year. Naturally, their bodies would produce less than 1,000 litres of milk in a year. Due to selective breeding and modem husbandry techniques, they deliver between 6,000 and 12,000 litres.

To achieve this they are milked almost all year round, even while pregnant. There is a period of only a few weeks during which they are given a respite. This is when they are heavily pregnant and their body simply couldn’t cope with a growing foetus as well as milking. Dairy cows often experience metabolic diseases because they can’t take in enough nutrition to meet the demands of the milking machine. Their systems may run short of calcium or magnesium, bringing them to the point where they physically collapse. The demands placed on the cows’ metabolism mean that they are often effectively malnourished, no matter how much they eat.

Cows are commonly artificially inseminated with semen from one of the large beef breeds. This gives a more valuable calf, which is good for the farmer. Unfortunately for the cow, this means that they give birth to a far larger calf than their pelvic girdle allows for. They frequently suffer greatly giving birth to these huge offspring, or require Caesarean operations, which weaken them further and shorten their lives.

A cow has to calve every year to produce milk, but her calf is taken away shortly after birth and fed on reconstituted milk. The mother’s milk is too valuable a commodity to waste on a calf. Like most animals, the cow has a strongly developed maternal instinct and it’s distressing for her to lose her calf. It’s upsetting for the calf as well.

Whereas a calf would have suckled, on and off, all day long, the cow is milked by machine, usually only twice a day. Cows frequently suffer from painful mastitis - due mainly to the amount of milk they have to produce. The pressure of accumulated milk causes great pain. Cows sometimes kick their own udders because they are in such distress. Eventually the strain may cause the ligaments of the udder to give way and the cow will be useless for milking. A short trip to the abattoir and her brief life is over.

People often assume that cows produce milk just because they are cows, and that producing milk is what they do - as if it were their job. But cows produce milk only in order to feed a calf. They have to be made pregnant every year so that they keep producing milk. This results in a lot of calves as a side-effect of milk production. What happens to a calf once it is taken from its mother? Not many need to be kept to maintain the dairy herd. Some 42 per cent of them end up as beef at around eighteen months old. Some are sent off a few days old to be reared as veal. The meat industry and the dairy industry are inseparable and as much as 80 per cent of beef comes from dairy farms.

The calves destined to become beef tend to have the most natural lives. Some are kept on grass and can roam relatively freely, although many live out their lives on concrete and are fed concentrates to accelerate their growth. They may be castrated and dehorned. Both these operations are highly stressful and usually very painful. The animals find being handled very distressing and they are often castrated without anaesthetic. Animals are dehorned to make them safer to handle. The operation should be performed under local anaesthetic. Unfortunately, animals are usually dehorned in batches, so the anaesthetic often hasn’t started to work or it may have begun to wear off by the time the dehorning starts. Worse still, I knew one vet who didn’t always use anaesthetics at all because some farmers wouldn’t pay the extra cost. ‘If they see me taking the anaesthetic out of my bag they just laugh,’ he told me.

You may wonder why having a horn cut off requires anaesthetics. The reason is that horns contain nerves and blood vessels. Having a hom removed is not like having your fingernails trimmed but more like having a finger or even a hand sawn off.

Veal was originally just the meat of an unweaned one- or two-day-old calf. Because they were so young, and had never eaten grass or exercised, their meat was un- usually pale and tender. It was also expensive because there isn’t much eating on a baby calf. Now veal production has become an industrial process. The calves are still taken from their mothers at a day old, but they are now kept in highly artificial conditions in order to keep their flesh pale and soft. Veal calves often live in pens so small that they can barely move. This stops them from using their muscles, so their flesh remains very tender. Sometimes they are kept in virtual darkness because there is a rather irrational belief that this contributes to the paleness of the meat. This makes observation for illness next to impossible, of course, so disease may go untreated.

However, the very nature of veal production prevents the welfare of veal calves being of crucial interest to those who rear them. The calves are allowed no solid food and are fed only on milk substitutes deficient in iron. Veal calves are deliberately made ill with anaemia in order to keep the meat pale. A malnpurished calf is the whole point of the veal system. In addition, their stomachs, which are designed to process large quantities of roughage, are deprived of anything solid whatsoever. The calves are not even allowed straw to lie on in case they eat it. Their craving for roughage is so strong that they chew on wood and eat their own coats. Their lives are very distressing.

However, even before the calves reach the veal units they have to face the stresses of transportation. It’s unpleasant and distressing for us to be in a bus or crowded underground train in the rush-hour; how much more so then for animals being transported for (as current UK regulations allow) up to 28 hours in such conditions, for much of that time unable to feed or drink. At least when we endure such circumstances for a much shorter period we know why we are there - the animals are terror-stricken because of the unfamiliarity of the whole experience. It was against these movements of animals that thousands of people protested at airports and docks in the UK in 1995. These mass demonstrations resulted in changes in the regulations affecting UK veal production, but conditions in many other parts of the world are unchanged.