The bond between mother and child is one of the most fundamental relationships in all of nature. It extends to animals and humans in similar intensity. Animals will kill to protect their young. They long to nurture their children, just like people do.
Animals raised for their flesh, milk and eggs suffer in many ways - being crowded and caged, mutilated in numerous painful ways. But one of the worse things we do these poor souls is how we brutally pervert and sever their family bonds.
Mother hens communicate with their chicks while the chicks are still inside the hen, and while the hen is sitting on the eggs. This is very much like humans who sing and talk to their babies when in utero. The connection starts early and strongly. Powerful instincts come into play for all mothers, human and animal.
But for animals, their eggs are removed as soon as they are laid. The maternal bond is broken, and the hens are given no period of rest to recuperate before they are forced to produce more eggs. Their lives are forced to be focused on one thing only - to make as many eggs as possible in the shortest amount of time.
Dairy animals like cows and goats have pregnancies of similar length to those of humans. Like humans, they experience powerful hormonal shifts and intense, loving connections to their babies before they are born. While humans get to love, protect, nurture and raise their children how they see fit and enjoy the miracle of closeness and watching a child grow, animal mothers in the dairy industry are devastated because their babies are taken away from them shortly after birth.
Mother cows and goats bellow and bawl piteously, for weeks, after their babies are abducted. The babies cry too, vulnerable little newborns, stripped of their mothers' protection and bond.
Male newborn calves and kids are often killed just after birth as waste products regarded as garbage. Babies. Infants. Newborns. Killed. For the "crime" of being born male - males cannot produce milk and therefore are of no use to dairy farmers. So they are brutally killed, sometimes beaten to death, sometimes literally thrown in the trash to suffocate and starve, bewildered, while their mothers lose their minds over the devastating loss.
Can anyone with even one shred of compassion imagine doing this to a human mother and child? It is every bit as heinous to do it to animals. But this is how the dairy industry must work, so that we can steal the very life fluid, the mothers' milk of innocent newborns, to keep selling milk, cheese and yogurt, products which incidentally cause some of the highest rates of disease in humans. It is an ugly, perverse practice.
Mother pigs during repeated pregnancies induced by sexual violation are kept in gestation crates so small they cannot even turn around, leading to actual mental breakdown, with the pigs obsessively chewing the bars of the cage, or banging their heads compulsively against the bars and the floor. Utter madness. And we do it to them.
Mother pigs give birth to their little piglets, at which point they may be moved to an only slightly larger crate, with minimal extra room for the newborns. The mother is forced to lie there, immobilized in her own waste, suckling her babies but she cannot move to protect them, and if one of them happens to go behind her, due to the inhumane confinement, the mother cannot see or sense what is happening and often ends up crushing her baby to death.
It is psychopathic and ghoulish to do this to sensitive, thinking, feeling animals like pigs, or any others.
Sheep and goats are as sensitive as any other animal. They are similarly abused, their babies stolen so that people can drink goat milk, eat goat cheese or eat the legs of lambs. Legs of helpless babies. How depraved! It is especially warped considering the amount of animal flesh or secretions we need to eat to survive is exactly ZERO.
We support abject violence and callous cruelty if we are not vegan.
Most consumers have no idea of the emotional misery they are supporting every time they buy milk, cheese or other dairy products, or of the abuse inherent in eating meat. Marketing has been perfected to a point that most consumers think animal mothers, all animals in agriculture, lead idyllic lives - no harm done. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Animal agriculture is built on exploitation, suffering and abuse.
If you would not want to be sexually violated and forcibly artificially inseminated to create your children; if you would not want your children ripped from you at birth; if you think the mother/child bond is sacred; if you have even a slight inkling that treating animals this way is wrong; if you have morals, you should be vegan.
We can safely, easily, happily and healthily thrive eating only plants.
Animals want to live their own lives, form their own bonds, pick their own mates, and be free to nurture their children. Just Like You. Learn to go vegan here.
Image Credits:
rmpelicano
Vinicius Pontes from Pexels
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