Member-only story
Meat: To Eat or Not
The Morality of Factory Farming
I once watched a video of a newly born calf being taken away from its mother. The terror of the tiny infant, the heart-rending cries of the mother… how can we as a society condone this? Yet it routinely happens in the dairy industry.
Cows need to have babies in order to produce milk. However, a nursing calf eats into the dairy industry’s profits. So babies are torn from their mothers, sometimes within hours of birth. These young calves are desperate for affection, yet are shoved away by callous people and isolated into tiny steel cages for the duration of their short, miserable lives.
This reality is what eventually drove me to become vegan.
At one point I thought being vegetarian was humane, but understanding what the dairy industry does to calves changed my mind.
Yet there came a point when I was told I needed animal protein. As a type IV cancer survivor, I had worked with a nutritionist to optimize my diet. A vegan diet can be a great anti-cancer regimen, and it’s much better than the standard American diet (SAD) but apparently it’s not always sufficient.
I had to consider the comparative morality of my options.
My husband found a local organic farm. We visited and saw how the cows were treated. The…
