The Slaughterhouse Is Always the Only Exit for Dairy Cows

Readers: I've updated this post roughly 237 times since it first went live on the site. I blame the fact that I wrote it while running on no sleep, but you're still entitled to roll your eyes at me and consider me annoying and unprofessional and unorganized for the day--I'll understand. But if you read this before 8:50 CST, there have been numerous edits, including paragraphs added in various places throughout. Sorry for any confusion experienced by readers who've witnessed this chaos in the last couple hours. Please feel free to snicker at me while I go take a nap.
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Many people consume dairy without really registering what they're consuming or how the cows are made to produce it--or what happens to the cows when their bodies wear out, and they stop producing enough to be profitable. What happens is the slaughterhouse. The idea that as long as we stop eating meat, no animals are intentionally killed for our diet just isn't true (the egg industry's hens and millions of just-hatched male chicks killed are another topic in this area).

But when the dairy industry started floating around the idea of "culling" a number of its cows because of current financial problems, some people's write-ups referred to the "poor cows" and talked about how the beef industry's effort to block the killing (to keep the dairy cow flesh from flooding the market) was some kind of win for the dairy cows too. But there's no win for dairy cows. This particular slaughter not happening won't change their difficult lives or stop their eventual slaughter tomorrow, next week, or next year. Read on.

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Last night, Google Reader informed me that Tom Laskawy, filling in for the vacationing Ezra Klein at The American Prospect, had posted about the business troubles being faced by the dairy industry. He remarked thus:

For those who need a handy case study on the insanity of our agricultural subsidy system, I give you the dairy industry's solution to falling prices caused by a "milk glut": kill the cows. Cows aren't assembly line robots who can be switched off when their output isn't selling. They need to be milked every day. So when you have a subsidy regime that tends to encourage over-expansion when times are good (to cash in on high prices) and over-production when times are bad (through payments that offset losses and provide an incentive for farmers to attempt to recoup as much as possible), you apparently discover that the only exit runs through the slaughterhouse. . . .

Someone brought this post to the attention of my fellow vegan and animal advocate Erik Marcus too, and Erik considers it a "simply fantastic post." But I respectfully disagree. Erik and I are focused on different aspects of the post, I suppose, but putting aside the fact that I completely, whole-heartedly agree that the U.S. agricultural subsidy system is absurd, I can't, from the perspective of an animal advocate, call any post "fantastic" that laments the idea that these current "poor cows" (as they are later referred to in the TAP post) could be killed for financial reasons now while seemingly ignoring that all these cows and future cows are going to be killed for financial reasons at some point regardless.

Indeed, the title of Erik's post praising and linking to the TAP piece is "Dairy: Subsidizing Slaughter"--and that's exactly my point and problem with Laskawy's post and those that resemble it. All of the dairy industry is always inherently tied to slaughter--both the slaughter of "spent" dairy cows and the slaughter of baby calves, the byproducts of dairy production. The dairy-slaughter connection is the norm, not a situation unique to this proposed slaughter or this economic climate.

One post to which Laskawy links jests that dairy cows are "cheering" because the beef industry has worked to stop the mass slaughter and because they now happily "get to" continue producing milk, as if that's something that benefits them at all, and as if they're doing it in natural, willing circumstances rather than being forced to do it. Another warns that "cows should be worried" about this situation--because there's nothing bad happening to them now? Because they're  not going to be killed anyway? Objection to or dismay at killing them now rather than killing them later, as if killing them now is somehow worse, when their lives are certainly nothing to romanticize, reminds me somewhat of the argument that we must keep breeding and killing cows for dairy (and flesh) because if we didn't, cows might stop existing--and never existing at all is apparently somehow worse than living in exploitation, having your babies continually taken away from you, and then dying a violent, premature death.

Anyway, moving on . . . I give Laskawy major (and sincere) kudos for referring to the cows as "who" instead of "that" in his post--this may seem minor to some, but I've seen and heard very few non-AR people make that language choice--but killing dairy cows for financial reasons is not a Big Dairy or subsidy issue. It's a dairy issue--period. And it exhausts me to see people lamenting the fact that all these cows could be killed, with what appears to be at least some degree of concern for the cows themselves, when the unavoidable truth is that these cows are all headed to the slaughterhouse at ages only a fraction of their natural life span no matter what. In fact, as horrific as the killing process is in slaughterhouses, the majority of dairy cows live in absolute misery, and they all must suffer through repeated cycles of grief as they are impregnated and then stripped of their calf almost immediately after birth, over and over again, and only the rarest of the rare escape the industry and make it to a sanctuary. So I can't say that I'd fight to allow these cows to suffer a few more years before being killed. The ones killed even more prematurely than originally planned because of financial troubles arguably would, in many cases, actually be the luckier ones (luckier--not lucky).

And I obviously agree with Laskawy that cows are not "assembly line robots," but I have to ask--isn't that essentially how humans treat them by turning them into milk machines? Again, not a Big Dairy problem, but a dairy problem. Forcibly input materials (semen) into machine (cow); let machine do its work (gestation and birthing); remove unwanted waste or byproducts (calves); retrieve and package final product for sale (milk). I don't care if it's subsidized or not. I don't care if it's a factory farm or a "family farm." It's all the same. The exploitation is the same, the  treatment of sentient, loving, and grieving animals as mere machines is the same, and the trip to and horrors of the slaughterhouse are the same. Well-meaning dairy consumers who, as was my experience for a long time, just don't realize yet, here is your periodic reminder: dairy cows and their calves suffer exploitation and pain and misery too; dairy cows and their calves experience the nightmare of slaughterhouses too; there's nothing humane about dairy. And if the thought of killing them in bad economic times bothers us, the thought of killing them in good economic times should bother us just as much.

Photos: Top, dairy cow, Flickr; Center, mother and newborn calf before humans tear them apart, following birth-on-display at Virginia's state fair; Bottom, Dylan, calf rescued one day before scheduled for auction & slaughter for veal, current resident of Woodstock Farm Animal Sanctuary