Got Milk? (Got Ethics?)

The Tuesday night (Jan 26, 2010) edition of ABC News' Nightline program aired an undercover segment on inhumane practices in the factory-farming dairy industry. Contrary to the bucolic ads you see on television about "happy cows" luxuriating in green fields, the life of the average dairy cow in America is anything but happy. The 5,000 cows on the New York dairy farm featured in the segment NEVER see grass. They spend their entire artificially-inseminated, miserable lives pregnant (so they continually lactate), crammed into giant manure-filled barns producing milk—until their milk production begins to fall after a few short years, at which point they're carted off to the slaughterhouse after living only 15 percent of their natural life span. Their horns are burned off and tails cut off without anesthesia, and in spite of their obvious pain with these procedures the farmer-owner said, "I don't see what you see" when asked if he thought the procedures hurt the cows. It's amazing what we humans are capable of not seeing. If you drink milk or consume dairy products, please watch the Nightline report and consider whether your pleasure is worth the pain it causes.

And if you think you need milk for calcium to prevent osteoporosis, consider this: America consumes more dairy products than any nation in the world while at the same time having the highest rates of osteoporosis of any nation. If you want calcium try consuming dark green vegetables like bok choy which has much higher levels of absorbable calcium than milk. The primary causes of osteoporosis are the acid base of the Standard American Diet (caused by meat, dairy, and excess grains) which causes the body to leach calcium from the bones to restore the body's ideal slightly-alkaline pH, and the lack of healthy (weight-bearing) stress on bones due to sedentary lifestyles. Moderate bone stress increases bone density and plant-based foods keep the body in a slightly alkaline (ideal) state.

Cow milk has one purpose in nature: to feed baby cows. If you aren't a baby cow you don't need milk (in spite of what uninformed, white-lipped celebrities ask you in their ads).

Kudos to Nightline for tackling this issue. You can see the Nightline video here.