Top 10 Reasons Cows Are Mad

With the discovery of mad cow disease in a cow from a California dairy farm and in potentially more cows as the U.S. Department of Agriculture searches for her former herdmates, PETA presents the top 10 reasons why cows are so darn mad:

1. How Many Kids and Counting?
   Unless you’re Michelle Duggar, you probably have no inclination to crank out one baby after another. Neither do cows used for their milk, but they are kept almost constantly pregnant so that they will continue to produce more milk.
2. Crying Over Stolen Milk
   Mother cows know the meaning of “mother’s love” too, and they often wail, sometimes for days, when their babies are taken away so that people can steal the milk that nature intended for their calves.
3. A Scene Out of a Saw Movie
   Farmers use one of several “Jigsaw”-inspired instruments—such as guillotine dehorners, caustic chemicals, searing-hot irons, and saws—to remove cows’ horns and calves’ sensitive horn tissue.

A barbaric device known as a “keystone” or “guillotine” dehorner

4. Castration Without So Much as an Aspirin
   Guys, you wouldn’t like it. Male calves don’t either.
5. Baby Bullies
   Veal is supposedly “tender” flesh, but there is nothing tender about how it is produced. Male calves, who are useless to the dairy industry because they don’t produce milk, are often forced to live alone inside frighteningly tiny, dark crates for months, kept virtually immobilized so that their muscles can’t develop, and deprived of sufficient iron, leaving their flesh the desired pale color.
6. A Bunch of Bull Crap
   Forcing cows to stand ankle-deep in feces on filthy lots is … you know the appropriate word.
7. Debbie Downer
   Downed cows are no longer allowed into the food supply, but what happens to them is a serious downer. They are sometimes simply left to die from their illness or injuries or from dehydration.
8. There’s no D.A.R.E. Program for Cows
   Farmers genetically manipulate and sometimes drug cows in order to force them to produce up to four and a half times as much milk as they naturally would for their calves.
9. The Road Trip From Hell
   Anyone who has ever been crammed shoulder to shoulder in a coupe for an extended road trip knows how miserable it is, and that’s even with bathroom breaks, food, water, and temperature controls. And while the trip may end at an annoying relative’s house, at least it doesn’t end at the slaughterhouse.
10. This Is the Thanks They Get
    After years of birthin’ babies and pumping out thousands of gallons of milk, do cows used for their milk get a comfy retirement? Heck, no! They get sent to slaughter, where, in the words of one slaughterhouse worker, they “die piece by piece.” A longtime slaughterhouse worker said he frequently cut the legs off completely conscious cows who blinked and made noises as their bodies were hacked apart.

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