Halal meat controversy

[isitafox]

Well I obviously can't vouch for every dairy farm in the country or watch the hidden camera vids but I will happily state that this

Cows produce milk for the same reason that humans do—to nourish their young—but calves born on dairy farms are taken from their mothers when they are just one day old and fed milk replacers so that humans can have the milk instead. Some may get powdered milk but so do humans, to get the best of the calves they will be fed regular milk.

In order to keep a steady supply of milk, the cows are repeatedly impregnated. Several times a day, dairy cows are hooked by their udders to electronic milking machines that can cause the cows to suffer electrical shocks, painful lesions, and mastitis. Not many farms will milk more than twice a day as doing so (as would not miling them enough) will lead to problems like mastitis which would then be a loss for the farmer. Also I doubt they would get electrical shocks as there shouldn't be anything near the cow able to give them a shock.

Some spend their entire lives standing on concrete floors; others are crammed into massive mud lots. Again, living conditions like this would cause the cows to produce less milk which would again be a loss. Keeping cows in sheds like this means farmers have to feed them corn or silage, this is not free so they are kept in sheds as little as possible, basically over the winter, to protect them from the bad weather and the risk of getting foot rot from being stuck in muddy fields or suffering from miscarriage due to the cold.

Cows have a natural lifespan of about 25 years and can produce milk for eight or nine years, but the stress caused by factory farm conditions leads to disease, lameness, and reproductive problems that render cows worthless to the dairy industry by the time they are four or five years old, at which time they are sent to the slaughterhouse. Stress does not cause disease nor lameness and a farmer would want a cow to live at least twice as long.

is bollocks. I'm by no means for animal cruelty but it pretty safe to state that when a cow costs a farmer over £1000 to buy (and £1000 would be very cheap) and a lot more to rear the last thing they can afford to do is treat them badly and risk having to have them slaughtered.

In the last year we have had two cows which had to be slaughtered because they had to have caesarians due to the calves being too big (just one of those things sadly). Only one of these calves survived which would probably make about £280 and be used as beef cattle. Taking into account a cost of just over £500 per section plus the loss of 2 cows worth around say £1500 a piece on average and a calf that is a loss of nearly £4500 within a couple of months not taking into account the milk yield from them for however many years they would be fit to produce it, you could also add to this the cost to replace the cows which again would be a further £2500-3000 at least so you're looking at £7500 purely due to mother nature.

At the end of the day though arguing against someone who has made their mind up that whatever is cruel to whichever species there is no way to change their opinion (not a dig at you Mark just people generally).