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11- THE MYTH ABOUT MILK
"A continual flow of milk is extracted from the dairy cow only by subjecting her to yearly pregnancies - starting from the age of two and each lasting nine months. After giving birth, she will be milked for 10 months - but will be impregnated with semen during her third month and for the remaining
seven months she will be milked when pregnant. She has only six to eight weeks between pregnancies. She will be milked twice or more times a day and the average Indian cow used in the Indian milk industry gives five times as much as she would have in the nineteen fifties as she has been genetically bred for bigger and softer udders.
To give higher yield, the cow is fed concentrated pellets of soya bean and cereal (which could have fed a great many more people). But even then, the demanded production of milk outstrips her appetite and she starts breaking down body tissue to produce the milk. The result is an illness called ketosis.
Another illness that she contracts early is rumen acidosis induced by large
helpings of quickly fermented carbohydrate, this disease leads to lameness. Most of the day the cow stands tied in a narrow stall in her own excrement and udder infections like mastitis, (a painful inflammation of the udder), step in. This long suffering, sick cow is kept alive by antibiotics, hormones and other drugs-all of which come to you in the morning milk.
Each year 20 percent of these dairy cows are taken out due to infertility or disease. These are then starved to death or sent by truck to the slaughterhouse to provide beef for those that see nothing wrong in eating it. Milk production is very closely allied to
THE BOOK OF COMPASSION
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