A Side of Rotting Baby Carcass with Your Morning Milk?

Reports of dead dairy-byproduct calves being unceremoniously dumped aren't entirely rare. Remember the "Your Dairy Dollars at Work" post from February? It's short. I'll wait here while you go read it.

The story there--of dozens of calves being dumped "to avoid rendering costs or hauling them to auction" because they weren't worth enough money--isn't an anomaly. Examples from just the last few days:

"Dead Animals Dumped Beside Water Supply"
"35 Dead Calves Found"

Calves are an inconvenient factor for the dairy industry, especially when the industry is having a tough financial time. Damn those mother cows for having to give birth to annoying living beings in order to keep pumping milk, am I right?

But hey, that's okay. Dairy "producers" know that most people don't know about, don't want to know about, or just don't give a damn about the countless babies torn away from their bellowing mothers every year and dragged to slaughter when they're still babies or even just newborns. Dairy producers know that most people don't want to be bothered to try out products like soy, rice, almond, and hemp milk, that dairy cheese is apparently a requirement for good life, that the enormous variety of nondairy ice creams available just aren't good enough because plant-based foods aren't as "natural" as products based on the breast milk of another species, intended for that species' young. So like the 250 million baby male chicks suffocated and ground alive for the egg industry each year in the United States alone, dairy cows' calves are trash. Sometimes, farmers can get paid for that trash. And sometimes what they'll be paid for that trash just isn't worth the effort.

When they can make a few bucks off the wobbly, crying, four-legged inconveniences, producers know they can take them to auctions and slaughter without much of anyone caring. And when they're not worth enough money to be troubled with, dairy producers can kill them cheaply and dump them on the side of the road or in a field and know that all people will care about is that the rotting bodies might infect the water supply--that, or people will express outrage for a couple days, and then they'll get over it because, hey, they're just baby cows, right? And they were going to be killed one way or another anyway, right? And we want their our milk. We just wish someone would have taken the calves whose deaths we demanded "to the landfill and disposed of them properly" so that we didn't have to see and smell their rotting carcasses while drinking that morning glass of milk. And someone tell those bellowing, mourning mother cows to shut up too, OK? They're souring the cream in people's coffee.

Top: Alamogordo News
Bottom: tylergreenphoto.com