I am Daisy the Dairy Cow, and I am pleading with you to put yourself in my shoes
I love my babies just like you, but I never get to know them. Year after year they are taken from me at birth and I never see them again. I am suffering, I am grieving, I am desperate, I am exhausted, and I am begging -mother to mother- please stand with us and be our voice.
I am Daisy the Dairy Cow, and I am pleading with you to put yourself in my shoes
I love my babies just like you, but I never get to know them. Year after year they are taken from me at birth and I never see them again. I am suffering, I am grieving, I am desperate, I am exhausted, and I am begging -mother to mother- please stand with us and be our voice.
The Dairy Lie
The Lie
The Reality
Dairy is natures perfect food but only if you are a baby cow. A mother cow’s milk is designed specifically to turn a 50lb calf into a 700lb cow as rapidly as possible. The dairy industry has worked hard and invested a lot of money with marketing and lobbying to make sure you and your children get the message that milk is not simply good for you but essential for your health, working with governments to suggest daily intakes and providing it to school children. We are told milk is natures perfect food, gives you strong bones, strong teeth, makes you tall and clever, cows milk is where humans get calcium from. On its face this is absurd, yet we have been convinced via clever advertising that essentially breastfeeding from another species into adulthood is necessary and healthy.
Mockery of Motherhood
The enormous business of dairy farming today, across the globe, is one of horror and riddled with unthinkable cruelty. Mother dairy cows are enslaved and treated as nothing more than milk producing machines with a complete disregard for their maternal instincts and their emotional and physical wellbeing. Cows are maternal and love and care for their babies and their motherhood is made a mockery of in the dairy industry. We have hijacked their reproductive systems, their babies and their babies’ milk. Their lives have no other purpose or meaning but to serve us; we want their milk. To get this milk for our dairy products we forcibly impregnate them, take their babies at birth and then steal their baby calf’s milk. Dairy cows are just commodities, their mental wellbeing is completely ignored.
Torture on an Industrial Scale
As demand for dairy increases so too has the pressure on dairy cows to produce unnatural amounts of milk. The number of dairy cows has actually declined but milk yields have increased, and the burden falls completely on the already suffering dairy cow. Cows are artificially impregnated and selectively bred to produce, in some cases, up to ten time more milk than 40 years ago, given hormones, fed unnatural diets including chicken feathers and fish in order to provide specific nutrients to maximise their milk yields; dairy cows often become emaciated from the burden of these huge milk yields.
The rise of mega dairies is increasing where herds are 1,000 plus and individual cow wellbeing is an impossibility, any personal relationship or knowing of an individual cow is not feasible. Zero grazing dairy farms are on the rise where cows are kept inside for most if not all their lives and often tethered at the neck, painful illnesses such as mastitis and foot rot going untreated, left to wade through their own waste, insufficient bedding and concrete floors.
Violence towards cows is pervasive in the dairy industry too. In order to manoeuvre these large mammals to keep the industry cogs turning force, beating and coercion are widespread. Innocent baby calves who are bewildered and just learning to stand are often thrown around by frustrated farmworkers.
The mega dairy in China of 100,000 cows is something the world should be truly ashamed of… and angry about”
Around the world smaller dairy farms, including family run ones, are just as brutal with tethering at the neck, shackling of lame cows, muzzling of new-born calves to prevent suckling from their mothers and new born calves often kept within sight but not within reach of their mothers.
We Steal Their Babies at Birth
Even if some, albeit few, dairy farms do have higher welfare standards and dairy cows are allowed to graze on pastures and kept in cleaner housing, the darkest part of dairy farming is at the forefront on all dairy farms, large or small. New-born calves ripped away from doting mothers in front of their eyes within a day of birth without explanation or comfort, never to see one another again, repeatedly. The mother child bond is something so special and sacred to humans, yet we make a mockery of it in the dairy industry. The suffering in the dairy industry is unparalleled and arguably the most cruel of all animal farming industries. Mother dairy cows are crying for their stolen babies. Sustained and relentless emotional pain coupled with ongoing physical hardship, only equating to torture.
Among all the horrendous cruelties dairy cows have to endure there is nothing like the pain of having your new born baby stolen from you in front of your eyes just after birth, repeatedly.
The thought of a mother cow crying for her stolen calf helplessly, often keeps me awake at night
Daisy's Story
Daisy was snatched from her mother at birth, the farmer took her off in a wheelbarrow just a few hours after being born, slammed into an isolation hutch, 3 hours out of the womb. She knew nothing but loneliness and suffering. She spent the first months of her life alone in a small hutch without any company or loving touch. Her mother she never knew. She walked back and forth, back and forth to the gate and back inside the kennel sized hutch. As she grew bigger her back scraped across the plastic hutch roof leaving her with painful wounds. She suffered so much but was too young to work out why. At 3 months she met with other calves and shared a small space with them. At 14 months she was forcibly impregnated by a farmer, Daisy was broken but the growth inside her made her feel comfort for the first time, still an infant herself but warmed by the kicking of her baby, Daisy had hope again. She disliked the faeces ridden floors she walked upon and the grains she was fed, still, she had a warm growth inside her. She anticipated their arrival and the suffering of the past seemed to fade away. When Daisy’s calf arrived after a long and painful labour, she felt love for the first time, her pitiful life now made sense, she licked her calf, moved them to comfort, they suckled, they touched and nuzzled and Daisy felt alive and full of purpose.
The farmer arrived wheeling a cart – Daisy’s calf was dragged away and the gate was slammed shut on her. Daisy watched as her calf was disappearing in to the distance and had no idea what was happening next. As Daisy waited patiently for her calf to be brought back, she began to lose hope, a feeling she had felt so much before in her life. She bellowed, she mooed, she paced, she collapsed – she despaired. Daisy’s calf had been taken away from her. Daisy’s grief was not heard. She was marched to the milking parlour coerced and prodded by an electronic stick, whilst frozen inside from confusion and shock.
Each day she cried for her calf and each day she was milked by machines. Her udders so sore, she waded through faeces and stood on concrete floors. Her bed where she slept was filthy and barren.
Day in day out she waded through the filth ridden floors, stood all day on concrete and remembered her calf. Two months on and Daisy is impregnated again by the farmer, she feels the kick and knows what’s coming, this time will be different. Innocently she anticipates their arrival and feels that sense of purpose and belonging again, all the pain from the past subsides. Nine months on and Daisy is a mother once again, her calf is wet, vulnerable but hers. Daisy licks and caresses and her new calf makes the pain go away and again, she feels joy and hope. Daisy has a purpose and her calf is with her.
The farmer arrives again with the cart. He drags her calf away from her bosom and slams the gate shut. Daisy watches and bellows for her calf to be returned, bellowing louder and louder as she watches her calf disappear into the distance. Daisy never sees her calf again.
The truth is, I can’t continue this recount of Daisy’s life as it’s even too painful to write. This is only the second time, but this cycle continues for at least two more pregnancies and abductions. Daisy’s life is not an exception in the dairy industry but the absolute norm. Every bit of dairy we consume is at the expense of this agony.
Testimonials
Agonising Separation
The worst pain you could inflict upon a human mother would be to take her baby away, yet we do this to cow mothers routinely, without the blink of an eye. The dairy industry is centred around the exploiting cows reproductive systems and separation of mother from new-born calf at birth in order to maximise the milk that can be taken and sold to humans.
Daisy is a mother, and she is denied the basic right and need to know, nurture and bond with her babies. Just imagine the acute agony and devastation she must feel when her new born calf is dragged away from her, shortly after birth just as they are bonding, a day she anticipated and looked forward to for nine months. I wince at the thought. She is left confused, desperate, voiceless and forgotten. She is a mother and just wants her baby back. Her baby calf is not ours it is hers. Her calf’s milk is not ours it is theirs. Dairy farmers carry out this most abhorrent and brutal act as routine practice all over the world on an industrial scale. Cow mothers are not seen as mothers but commodities, enslaved for our taste buds, our property. Impregnated year after year to provide humans with their maternal milk, so we can have cheese, cream, butter and ice cream, the list goes on, all seem tempting and tasty and very affordable, but the real cost is the stuff nightmares are made of.
Even some of the most ardent, profit orientated farmers have confessed that the calf separation weighs heavy on their heart and that the killing of the unwanted male calves is the dairy industry’s dirty secret, an own goal in regard to their reputation.
After losing my son, I saw footage of a mother cow collapsing in the mud with grief as they carried her calf away from her. Just as I did when they carried my son’s body away. It’s why I’m vegan
— enchantedfarmfactory
Our Purpose
The purpose of this website is to get you to see dairy cows as mothers and not mere milk machines that are here to serve us. A cow produces milk because she is a mother, this milk is meant to nurture and grow her baby calf, it is not intended for humans nor is it suitable for us. Humans need cow’s milk as much as they need elephant’s milk. Whether we churn it into butter, process it into cheese, ferment it into yoghurt or add sugar and fruit and call it a milkshake, it is all the milk intended for a grieving mother’s stolen calf. Dairy farming involves cows suffering for years on end, an eternity for them. The dairy industry is one of prolonged agony and death is all around. However, it was that humans first came to domesticate cows and use their babies milk in our diets the dairy industry today is monstrous. To churn out these products that the Western diet is so heavily structured around means a life of horror for dairy cows. Their milk is not the innocent, bountiful and harmless product which so many of us assume it is, with many ethical vegetarians believing this too. Little by little we’ve forgotten every aspect of them as mothers and sentient beings. They were never ‘dairy’ cows, just mother cows, and now they are just ‘dairy’ cows and never mothers. Our relationship with dairy cows today is one of absolute dominion.
― Jessica Strathdee
Dairy cows on farms all over the world are suffering and in pain for so many reasons but above anything else they are suffering as forgotten mothers.
— Joaquin Phoenix
Mother to Mother
We impregante them only to take their babies just so we can steal their milk.
Now I know about the functioning of the dairy industry and the extreme suffering of mother cows, it is etched into my mind and I think of their pain constantly. Our supermarket shelves are filled with the products made with the milk intended for their new born babies, we are all dining on their suffering, whether unknowingly or otherwise. The yoghurt pots, cheese spreads and croissants we innocently put in our shopping trolley or the margarita pizza we order are the cause of agonising suffering, mother cows suffering, behind the scenes in ways we could not imagine. Something so small to us but their entire wellbeing.
I can barely breathe for the love I have for my son, its so powerful its overwhelming. Whenever I am having a precious moment with him I consider how special this is and how fortunate I am. Our food choices deny dairy cows the chance to ever know their babies. A piece of cheese or pot of yoghurt for us, but another stolen baby for them; they are deeply grieving and forgotten mothers.
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