Mother and Son: The Way It Should Be But Hardly Ever Is

by Stephanie Ernst · 2009-01-21 13:05:00 UTC
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I wanted to embed a video for you here, but technical difficulties prevented it, so I'm going to supply you with links instead. Follow this link to have the video open in Windows Media Player on a large screen, or follow this link to see the smaller video embedded in the related news article. (Really, watch the video. The rest of this post will make more sense, and there are adorable sights that I just can't describe.)

Now for the less adorable part. If Hillside Animal Sanctuary hadn't rescued Clover, a dairy cow, one of two things would have happened, as noted by the sanctuary worker in the video:

1. Because there was too much pus in her milk (and yes, a fair amount of pus is legally allowed and is present in all the cow's milk consumed by humans), and no farmer businessman is going to keep around an animal a machine from whom which he can't profit, she would have been killed, and the calf she was carrying would have died along with her. (I don't know enough about this particular story to know with certainty whether Clover then would have been turned into hamburger, which does come mostly from "spent" dairy cows.)

2. Or she would have given birth before being killed, and her sweet calf would have been taken away almost immediately to be turned into veal.

Luckily, neither of these things happened in this case. But as we watch the news story on Clover and her unexpected (unexpected by the sanctuary, that is) calf, we have to take note of that playful, sweet-faced calf. He very easily could have been yet another victim of the dairy/veal industry. Clover and her son Bramble will live out natural lives now, together, but most are not so lucky.

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(Thanks to Alison of the heart2heart list for providing the alert to this story.)

Photo source

Stephanie Ernst wrote the original Animal Rights blog at Change.org until December 2009. She can now be found at Animal Rights & AntiOppression.
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