Read Veganist: Lose Weight, Get Healthy, Change the World Online
Authors: Kathy Freston
Tags: #food.cookbooks
And this is what happens to dairy cows…
In December 2008, I was hired as a maintenance worker at a large dairy farm. During the six weeks I worked there, I witnessed animal abuse on a massive scale. Although there were many instances of sadistic workers hitting cows for fun, or unnecessarily using electric prods, most abuse was institutional in nature, done not for pleasure but for profit. On this mega dairy farm, over 7,000 cows live in overcrowded, highly unsanitary conditions. They are mutilated, drugged, neglected, left to endure a variety of painful illnesses, and emotionally traumatized by forced separation from their young. The realities of industrial dairy farming are a well-kept secret, nothing like the idyllic dairy farms seen on milk cartons and television ads. During the course of my employment, I encountered thousands of animals that bore the cost of this deception. These are a few of their stories.
It’s my second day on the job, and I’m repairing a broken gate in the birthing area, a remote corner of a huge barn where expecting cows are brought to deliver their young. Number 70426, a four-year-old Holstein cow, has just begun to give birth. A worker arrives carrying an archaic-looking metal device that he clamps between the mother cow’s nostrils, tethering her in place. He then walks behind her and wraps a steel chain around the emerging forelegs of the birthing calf, putting all of his weight into yanking it out.
The calf falls to the ground with a thud and lies startled on the barren concrete floor. She has a distinctive look, all white except for prominent black markings around her eyes and another at the base of her tail. Her wide, doe-eyes survey her surroundings for the first time before settling on her mom.
Once the worker releases 70426, she makes a beeline directly to her newborn calf, contentedly comforting her with gentle licks. This heartwarming scene is interrupted after only mere minutes, when the worker returns, abruptly grabs the calf and begins to drag her away by one hind leg.
Number 70426 runs behind her calf as they each bellow in distress. When the calf is dragged behind a locked gate, her mother presses her body against the gate and cries out, filling the barn with a sound reminiscent of a tornado siren. But the gate doesn’t budge. This is the last time she will ever see her calf, and I feel like she realizes it.
Numbr 70426 continues to call for her baby throughout the afternoon. When she notices me watching, she begins alternating her attention between the gate and me, bellowing with increased urgency. I have to wonder if she is just afraid, or if she is actually pleading for my help. I know that she goes through this every year, but by the looks of her, it never gets easier.
Most calves born on this farm are unwanted by the industry and sent to slaughter when they are only a few days old; however, some females are raised to take their mothers’ places. 70426’s calf, issued the number 21562, is about to begin a life of intensive milk production.
When she is only weeks old, 21562’s horns and tail are amputated. No anesthesia is used. I watch as she is muzzled and tied to a post with the same halter rope used on her mother a month earlier. Using a hot iron scoop, a barn worker begins a process called “disbudding,” literally digging the formative horn buds out of her skull. I’ll never forget the sight of the smoke billowing from the calf’s head as the hot iron met her skin, coupled with the sizzling sound and smell of seared tissue.
“It’s incredibly f***ing painful,” is how my supervisor explains the process to me. As the worker burns into her skull with the device, 21562 attempts to buck, cries out and tries to escape, but in her ad hoc restraints, she can only produce a muffled moan, before she begins to shake, and finally, collapses.
Unfazed, the worker grabs her tail, yanks her back up, and callously digs his thumb and forefinger into her eye sockets, painfully restricting her motion even further, as he resumes his work.
When the horns are fully burned away, she is then “tail docked.” The worker uses a steel clamp to remove a portion of 21562’s tail, slicing through her skin, bone, and nerve endings as she kicks and continues to bellow in distress. When she is finally released from the muzzle, saliva pours from her mouth.
Disbudding is an almost universal mutilation carried out on calves raised in intensive confinement on dairy factory farms. When she matures, 21562 will spend every day in a crowded indoor pen, backed up against hundreds of other cows, each vying for space in this narrow, concrete enclosure. The pens are never properly cleaned, forcing her to live in her own bacteria-laden manure. She will only leave this space when she is herded to the milking parlor, milked for five minutes by an automated machine, and returned to her pen. Unlike the pastoral images stamped on the products in which her milk will be sold, 21562 will never graze outside, and will be deprived of access to sunshine, open space, fresh air, and a normal diet.
Cows at this facility are expected to produce upwards of 80 pounds of milk each day—more than five times what they produce naturally. Milk production is bolstered by a foreign diet of grain, longer hours of artificial light, and the routine use of antibiotics, steroids, and the controversial growth hormone rBST. Above all, her milk production is manipulated through repeated impregnation.
My supervisor explained that when a cow begins to produce less than 65 pounds of milk a day, she is “freshened,” meaning artificially inseminated to restimulate lactation, typically as soon as two months after her most recent calving. Such an intensive breeding regimen coupled with overmilking is known to cause malnutrition, mastitis (a painful udder inflammation that increases pus levels in milk), abomasal displacement (stomach distention), leg spraddling (crippling), and uterine prolapses (inversion of the uterus, which reduces blood flow and causes decay). Each of these painful afflictions was common at this facility.
Number 46570 endured a lifetime under these conditions before succumbing to a crippling joint infection. She developed a bad sore where her back leg repeatedly chafed on her concrete “bed.” The open wound became impacted with manure until it swelled to the size of a softball, visibly dripping pus from a deep abscess in the center. When her condition had fully deteriorated, she was brought to a section of the farm designated for “downers,” cows too sick or injured to support their own weight.
I checked on 46570 a week later and was dismayed, if not surprised, to learn that she still hadn’t received any meaningful veterinary care. Her cloudy eyes were flared open with an intense look I had seen many times before—an expression of unimaginable suffering. Her right foreleg spasmed involuntarily, and as she breathed in short, heavy bursts, I could hear the crunching noise of her grinding jaw.
Another week went by and she still lay in the same place. By now, she had become extremely thin, far too weak to even lift her head to drink. I sought out the facility’s only veterinarian, who insisted that she might still get up if given time.
Although this rationalization was beyond unlikely—downed cows almost never get up after three days—there may have been another reason for prolonging her suffering. Recent legislation banned the sale of downers for human consumption, but not for use in animal by-products. I learned that this loophole means there’s a the financial incentive for dairy facilities to withhold humane euthanasia until a downer can be sold to a rendering facility, which will process her into the raw ingredients of products like soap and dog food.
Respite finally came during the third week, and sure enough, it was in the form of a rendering truck. She lay motionless as a chain was strapped around her leg and she was dragged into the cargo hold.
My eyes followed her until they settled on the nursery pen where I first saw 70426’s emotional separation from her last calf, 21562. It was a cynical reminder that this cycle of life, death, pain, and profit would continue, not just on this factory farm, but on thousands across the nation.
My experiences indicate that, despite the industry’s claims, there is little for the modern dairy cow to be “happy” about. These gentle, intelligent creatures are overdriven from the day they are born, and abandoned as soon as they begin to wear out. If the industry thought these practices were defensible, they would not be so committed to concealing the truth.
These are not isolated incidents. I know you want to believe that they are, but they aren’t. Every time an investigator goes undercover, these sorts of routine horrors and abuses come to light. Every time.
Hard as it is to face, when we know the truth of what’s going on, we can choose freely and wisely what to eat. Some will say, “But what about ‘humanely raised’ meat?” or “Aren’t the ranchers who grow organic, grass-fed beef and poultry and pork doing things differently?” Yes, a little. For that tiny percentage of “humanely raised” animals—the “lucky ones” who are given room to turn around, lie down, or stretch their wings—life may indeed be a tad bit better, but it is far from “good.” Even the animals who are raised on smaller farms (minuscule number though that is) are ultimately sent—often by a long and harrowing truck drive in all kinds of severe weather—to the very same horrid slaughterhouses that kill their factory-farmed kin.
I recently saw a video shot by a University of Texas film student called
Free Range?
The student, Neel Parekh, was allowed to shoot openly on a free-range farm. You see their chickens being slaughtered in a manner identical to that of factory-farmed chickens, and they are clearly still conscious when they are immersed—necks sliced open and blood pouring out—in scalding hot water for feather removal. Anyone who is thinking about “humane meat”: please do an online search for, and watch, this young man’s video.
And remember this: the vast majority—more than 95 percent—of animals people eat are raised in factory farms and not on the old-fashioned family farms of memory.
When you eat a plant-based diet, you make a powerful promise to yourself: you say no to causing needless suffering; you say no to hurting animals.
Did you know?
When I began considering my diet as a way to practice my spiritual beliefs, I came up against so much inner turmoil. How could eating meat, dairy, and eggs be wrong when so many people do it daily and with gusto? If long-standing faith traditions hold that eating animals is acceptable, who was I to question those traditions?
And yet, especially after watching behind-the-scenes video of what happens to animals as they become our food, I remained troubled, on a spiritual level, at the thought of eating them. If I am someone who wants peace in the world, how can I make peace with my part in the system of institutionalized cruelty and misery toward animals? How could I feel peaceful inside if I continued to collude with this bringing of suffering? The more I meditated on it, the clearer it became: Choosing to be a veganist is not just about my physical health, it is about the well-being of all creatures of this planet; it is a vital part of an awake and aware spiritual practice as well. It’s not just that I choose not to contribute to the suffering of animals; my vegan choices also allow me to become the person I want to be.
Investigating the Great Faith Traditions
For a long time I had the idea that the great faith traditions aren’t concerned with food or even with our relationship to animals, but as I gave it serious thought, that didn’t seem correct to me. How could any wisdom tradition that has endured for many hundreds or thousands of years not have reflected on so fundamental a question as how we relate to these fellow creatures? Animals are so totally in our power, after all, and isn’t spirituality in part a matter of how we choose to treat the powerless?
I decided to do some searching—both soul searching and researching the world’s spiritual traditions—to find out what they really suggest about the question of eating animals.
The first thing that became clear was that virtually all spiritual traditions have indeed considered the question of whether it is ethical for humans to eat animals. My initial explorations only skimmed the surface, but even so it was easy to see that spiritual leaders throughout the ages have grappled with the contradictions inherent in following and advocating a peaceful, humane existence while killing and eating animals. For Christians and Jews the dilemma is so central that it is addressed in the very first chapter of the first book of the Bible, Genesis, preceding even the Ten Commandments! The first thing God does after creating humans is call humanity to steward the earth and its creatures, but the second thing God does is declare, “See, I have given you every plant-yielding seed that is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit; you shall have them for food” (Genesis 1:29–30). A clear call for vegetarianism, it would seem.
I already knew that important contemporary religious leaders from Pope Benedict XVI to His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama had condemned factory farming. What I didn’t expect was that it wasn’t just a few great lights or just a few religious traditions speaking about meat as a problem. Spiritual traditions have always wrestled with the questions raised by eating animals.
“One of the most striking things one discovers in comparative religion,” the historian of religions and Jewish studies scholar Aaron Gross, PhD, explained to me:
The potential moral danger of meat eating is a major theme across religious traditions. Eating meat is often condemned and, if not, it is surrounded by cautions and restrictions as is the case in Christianity, Islam, and Judaism. Mircea Eliade, arguably the most influential scholar of religion in the twentieth century, in fact argued that the ancient hunter’s sympathy for the animals he killed was one of the origins of religion itself. Religion begins in part, Eliade theorized, out of concern about the problem posed by killing in order to live.
It seems that my discomfort with the business of eating meat has ample precedent! So not surprisingly, as soon as I looked, I found numerous spiritual leaders from multiple traditions calling upon us to eat more spiritually and mindfully.
Christian Traditions
A new generation of Christian theologians has shown that the question of food, especially meat, has been one of the great religious questions in Christian history. David Grumett, PhD, and Rachel Muers, PhD, are the first scholars to systematically study the issue. “Nowadays people might think of religion as being about abstract beliefs,” explains Grumett, “but if you look back through history it’s been very much about people’s day-to-day lives, such as what they ate.”
Today Christian theologians are rediscovering the links between our dietary and spiritual choices. Many are arguing that vegetarianism is the diet most compatible with Christian values like mercy and compassion. The Anglican priest and Oxford professor Andrew Linzey, PhD, argues that “to stand with Jesus is to… honor life for the sake of the Lord of life…. To stand for Jesus is to stand for active compassion for the weak, against the principle that might is right.” For Linzey, this means Christians should be vegetarian.
Theologians like Linzey, I learned, are part of a long tradition of meat abstainers that stretches back to the origins of Christian faith. The Desert Fathers, fourth-century Christian saints, abstained from meat. The fifteen-hundred-year-old Rule of Saint Benedict, a pillar of monastic spiritual practice, severely restricts meat eating. Under the influence of this rule many contemporary monastic orders, especially in Eastern Christianity, are vegetarian to this day.
Some later Christian leaders were semi-vegetarians, like Saint Francis of Assisi (1182–1226), who avoided meat as best they could. Others, like the founder of Methodism, John Wesley (1703–1791), were full-time vegetarians. Many more were vegetarian for limited periods. Still today there is a vibrant Catholic tradition of giving up some or all meat for Lent, the period before Easter.
While contemporary Christian vegetarianism is usually rooted in ethical concerns about the abuse of creation, historically Christians who chose not to eat flesh also saw their diet as a path to greater spirituality and increased sanctity. Both seem like good reasons to me!
I was delighted to learn about this rich tradition of incorporating vegetarian diets into spiritual practice, but I admit that it surprised me at first. It certainly is not something most Christians in America know about. If you do some searching, though—even simply by searching “Christianity and vegetarianism” on the Internet—it’s easy to see just how important the idea of peace among all creatures has been in the Christian moral imagination. Indeed, you don’t need to look any farther than the first thirty lines of the Bible: the diet God ordains in Eden is strictly vegetarian! You don’t need to take my word for that. Jewish and Christian biblical interpreters have agreed for millennia that Genesis 1:29–30, the verse I quoted at the beginning of this chapter, is proof that humanity’s first diet was meat free.
It’s a stunning vision when you pause to think about it. When God imagined the perfect world, it was a world where humans did not eat animals, but instead lived on the gifts of food growing on trees and in the ground. According to the biblical narrative, it was only after the fall that humans started eating animals. The ideal is to strive to return to the original perfection. This is why when the prophet Isaiah is describing the messianic era in which the world is again made perfect, he declares that “[t]he wolf shall live with the lamb…and the lion shall eat straw like the ox” (Isaiah 11:6–7). Given this, it makes perfect sense that today more Christians are questioning the rightness of eating meat and are turning toward vegetarianism.
The endorsement of vegetarianism in the first chapter of Genesis is sometimes ignored by Christians who like to emphasize that by the ninth chapter, human beings have been given permission to eat meat. So I decided to look into how that “permission” to eat animals is portrayed in the Bible.
One thing all commentators seem to agree on is that the late tolerance of meat eating doesn’t mean that God just “made a mistake” and realized that slaughterhouses were actually a good idea. A long history of Jewish and Christian commentators have taught that granting permission to eat meat is portrayed in the Bible as a concession to human weakness. In the very same biblical verses where permission to eat meat is given, all humanity is required to drain blood, an ancient symbol of life, from the animals. At first draining the blood from animals—still practiced in virtually all slaughterhouses today—just seemed bizarre to me, but scholars have deciphered its meaning: namely, to remind human beings that meat eating was not part of God’s original plan.
In an exhaustive 3,000-plus-page analysis of Leviticus, Rabbi Jacob Milgrom, PhD, the foremost biblical expert on this issue, shows that if we want to understand the immense importance the Bible gives to the blood prohibition, we have to look back to the beginning of Genesis. “Above all,” Milgrom writes, “it must be recalled that… man was initially meant to be a vegetarian. Later, God concedes to man’s carnivorous desires: his craving for meat is to be indulged, but he is to abstain from consuming the blood.” Milgrom explains that the Bible shows an “uneasiness regarding man’s uncontrolled power over animal life…. [I]t seeks to curb that power. All men must eschew the lifeblood of the animal by draining it…. Mankind has a right to nourishment, not to life. Hence the blood, the symbol of life, must be drained, returned to the universe, to God.”
If that seems surprising, it’s because of how alienated we are from these issues today. As Milgrom observes, this kind of concern about killing was once much more common: “Anthropological and comparative evidence indicates that the reluctance to kill an animal harks back to a much earlier period.” In the end, Milgrom concludes that the blood prohibition is part of a biblical ethic that demands “reverence for life.”
Rather than giving humans carte blanche to eat meat, the Bible saddles the practice with restrictions. And if eating meat even from animals raised back in the good old days before intensive confinement and antibiotics and industrial slaughterhouses wasn’t endorsed, then what does that suggest about our own day, when animals suffer miserable lives on factory farms and painful deaths in industrial slaughterhouses?
In sum: What would Jesus think of a factory farm? It’s one thing to concede that meat eating was temporarily tolerable to ancient herders, but when all you have to do is order something different from a menu or reach for a different part of the supermarket shelf, wouldn’t the Christian thing be to choose the more peaceful option?
My Own Spiritual Path
I suppose I should say a bit about my spiritual path: I was baptized a Catholic and thought of myself exclusively as a Christian for many years. Even though today I also find spiritual sustenance from other traditions, my spiritual journey has never led me to reject anything Jesus taught. Everything the churches I attended taught about the life of Jesus—his love for creation, mercy, compassion, and special concern for the powerless—leads me to think he would never have accepted a diet that contributed to the groans of creation. As the Apostle Paul explains in a beautiful passage, it is not only humans that look forward to salvation: “The whole creation has been groaning in labor pains until now” (Romans 8:22). Animals and all the earth are included in God’s plan.
I also love that in his first letter to the Thessalonians, Paul calls on the community to “pray ceaselessly.” I don’t think he meant that we should constantly have our heads bowed, murmuring prayers, but rather that we should live as if we were constantly trying to be the people we are guided to be. Since eating is so central to our lives, it seems to me that eating consciously can be the foundation of our conscious life. It can be our way of praying ceaselessly.
I don’t see how the ultimate Good Shepherd, the Prince of Peace, could be okay with a lifestyle that promotes misery and destroys health. Maybe Jesus wasn’t a strict vegetarian 2,000 years ago, but there sure is something to the idea that he would be today.
Consider the reflections of the Jesuit priest John Dear, who explains that “today Jesus… would want us to change every aspect of our lives, to seek complete physical, spiritual, emotional, and ethical wholeness…. So, when we sit down to eat… we should also choose to adhere to his life of compassion and nonviolence by maintaining a vegetarian diet.” Like Christians have for centuries, he sees a plant-based diet contributing to our spiritual wellness. He adds that “we know that as we practice mercy to one another and to all God’s creatures, we too shall receive mercy and blessings, as Jesus promised in the Beatitudes.”
The influential “ecotheologian” Thomas Berry reaches the same conclusion. “Vegetarianism is a way of life that we should all move toward for economic survival, physical well-being, and spiritual integrity.” In perhaps his most famous teaching, Berry speaks against the idea that the world is a mere “collection of objects” and insists we look at creation as a “communion of subjects.” By leaving animal products out of our diet we welcome into our lives new, more beautiful, and more inspiring ways of being a part of the natural world.