Investigation: Abhorrent Cruelties for Land O'Lakes Dairy

By now, you may have heard about the undercover video and investigation details released earlier this week by PETA. If not, here's the rundown: Someone from PETA spent five months at a dairy in Pennsylvania as an undercover investigator. The dairy is a Land O'Lakes supplier. And the extreme suffering, horrid conditions, and excruciating, debilitating injuries and illnesses the cows are forced to endure are indisputable. It is all documented clearly. The post continues after the below video, so don't forget to click the "Read More" link:

You can read more details here; a follow-up here also includes the response from Land O'Lakes.

One point that I feel almost always needs to be made after these investigations that call out specific companies or facilities is that these conditions are not unusual. It's easy to say, "Well, I just won't buy Land O'Lakes products anymore," but in reality, that's a meaningless gesture. Cows and calves suffer just as much, in the same and additional ways, at operations for other companies. Even buying organic (a term that means nothing when it comes to the well-being of the animals, except that their illnesses often just aren't treated because antibiotics would make their milk non-organic) or cutting out all dairy products except for what you can buy somewhere locally is a self-comforting gesture rather than a way to really stand up for, and remove yourself from the suffering and killing of, cows.

How so? As noted many times before, but as I will continue repeating in posts for any new readers coming along, all dairy inherently involves anguish and slaughter. Cows produce milk, just as human mothers do, for their babies. No babies, no milk. So humans artificially inseminate them, let them give birth, and then immediately rip their babies away, to the extreme distress of mother and baby both, so that humans can steal the milk the mother's body is producing for her newborn. A few female calves are allowed to live so that they can be turned into baby-and-milk-factory machines themselves, and the male newborns and remaining females are dragged off on their wobbly legs, crying out for their mothers, to be killed. Some become veal; some just become trash.

The mothers bellow out and mourn for their stolen infants, over and over again, but their suffering is ignored, and the process keeps repeating, until the mothers' bodies are so worn down that they too are dragged off to the slaughterhouse to become hamburger. And none of this, in the dairy industry, is "cruelty." It's the very premise of the dairy industry. It's what must happen for people to get dairy products, from anywhere. For humans to have cows' milk, mothers and babies must be traumatized, babies must be slaughtered as babies, and mothers must be slaughtered when they're no longer profitable.

Take it from Marji of Animal Place Sanctuary:

But here is the deal: The animals do not care if Land O'Lakes requires its suppliers to implement a welfare policy of any type - they care about living, sleeping comfortably, eating, being with friends, nursing their babies. Which is why a dietary change is a lot more helpful to the animals than policy change. We encourage you to remove dairy and cheese from your diet, starting today! Try soy milk in your cereal or almond milk for your baking. Moving toward a compassionate diet is easy - take it as slow or fast as you want and make it an enjoyable, delicious experience!

And it's a perfect time for you to go vegan -- tomorrow is World Farm Animals Day, and today is the start of VeganMoFo! Stay tuned for info on the latter.

---

Photo courtesy PETA

Side note: If you traveled to the investigation's main page, you may have noticed PETA's reference to Temple Grandin as a world-renowned expert. The organization's continuing all-but-endorsement of Temple Grandin remains frustrating for animal rights advocates. If you're interested, Grandin has been discussed in multiple posts here before: 1, 2, and 3, the latter a guest post from author Jeff Masson.