Dairy cows

Each year over 200 million cattle are reared for dairy worldwide. The majority are farmed intensively in systems where they are confined, mutilated, overworked and unable to express their natural behaviours.

Overworked cows

A cow in a herd of wild cattle or farmed beef cattle living outdoors produces one calf a year and will feed it until it is six to eight months old, about 10 litres of milk a day, around 1,000 litres in one lactation.

• The modern high yielding dairy cow produces:
• One calf a year (which is removed within 72 hours)
• 40 litres a day from the typical cow or even 50-70
• litres a day from the most productive animals
• 6,000-12,000 litres of milk in a lactation period
• of 10 months.

These high yields lead to serious problems for the cow: mastitis - a painful inflammation of the udder - and lameness. Lameness – which can be extremely painful – is the biggest problem facing today’s dairy cows. In the EU and US, about half the cows go lame in any one year and 20% are lame at any one time. (A number of factors can cause these conditions, but the drive to high yields is certainly one of them.)

The cow needs to consume an enormous amount of food to sustain her high milk yield. As a result, she may simultaneously be: feeling hungry as she cannot eat enough; suffering from digestive disorders as her system is unable to cope with processing all the food she has to consume; physically exhausted as she has to spend so much time eating that she has too little time for rest.

Separation of the cow and her calf so that the milk can be used for human consumption causes great distress to both cow and calf. Dairy cows have been pushed to ever-higher milk yields – this has led to severe welfare problems.

She may die of ‘production diseases’ which occur when her body is no longer able to cope with the high levels of lactation; indeed, for seven months of the year she is simultaneously pregnant and lactating. After two to three lactations she will probably be infertile, chronically lame and utterly worn out. Eventually she will be culled - when she is just 4 -5 years old. A healthy cow, producing a normal amount of milk, could live for over 20 years.

An increasing proportion of dairy cows never or rarely experience the pleasure of grazing in green fields. A cow at pasture cannot get sufficient nutrients to sustain today’s high milk yields. So, increasingly, cows are moved indoors where they are ‘zero-grazed’ for all or most of their adult lives. In the US, many are kept on ‘dry lots’ – the cows are confined in overcrowded, barren dirt lots, devoid of grass.

Mutilations: tail-docking

Tail-docking is routinely practised to prevent dirtiness and improve worker convenience. Often performed without anaesthetic, this practice can cause long-term discomfort as well as short-term pain. Tail-docking deprives cows of important means of communication, self-stimulation and fly control. Tail-docking is now banned in a number of European countries including the UK , but remains common in the USA.

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