NZ Dairy Cruelty

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• Don't cows get sick if they aren't milked?
• What's wrong with organic dairy?
• What is colostrum?
• Aren't NZ cows happy because they live outside in fields?
• I want to go vegan but my parents don't support me
• What about calcium?
• What about protein?
• Animals kill other animals for food, why shouldn't we?
• Is tofu tasteless?
• I would go vegan, but I could never give up cheese
• What about the dairy farmers? Don't you care about them?

 In order for a cow, like any other mammal, to produce milk, she must have a baby. Naturally the milk produced by the cow would go to feeding her calf. Cows produce milk for the sole purpose of feeding their babies.

However, because humans want to drink this milk, the calf is taken away from her mother within a few days (or sometimes within a few hours).

Because thecalf has been taken away, there is nowhere for the milk to go. If the calf was not taken away, then the calf would drink the milk

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Colostrum is the thick yellow fluid which is produced by the cow (and all lactating mammals) initially after birthing, it is the first "milk" for newborns (approx. 36L from the cow).

It contains protein, nutrients for growth, antibodies for disease protection and immune support. Colostrum is necessary for calf health, growth and protection from disease.

The newborn calf is particularly vulnerable to disease - in particular, pneumonia and diarrhea (scour). The colostrum contains extra nutrients and antibodies to help protect the calf at this time. Colostrum is crucial for the prevention of calf diarrhoea and pneumonia.

On farms providing colostrum to the health food industry, this crucial food is currently being withheld from calves. It is being stripped from the cow, processed and marketed as a health food supplement.

Colostrum is also sold to animal food and medicine manufacturers, for supplemental or replacement feeding.

Source: ALA Website

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Just because dairy cows are not confined indoors like factory farmed animals, they still suffer immensely on dairy farms.

Cows on NZ dairy farms suffer from painful teat diseases such as mastitis, as well as being slaughtered when they are only 7 years old, having their babies ripped away from them within a few days of giving birth, being cruelly transported to slaughterhouses and more.

Click here for more info

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Thousands of people have gone through this before, and we all have different stories to tell.

The two things that most parents are concern about are:

1. They don't think a vegan diet is healthy
2. They don't want to have to cook multiple meals each night

Here's are some tips on how to show your parents that being vegan is healthy, that they don't have to cook multiple meals and that it is the right thing to do for the sake of the animals.

1. Show them our Health Issues page
2. Show them our Life of a Dairy Cow page
3. Make vegan versions of family favourites (e.g., make pizza, and have half with no cheese or meat, instead put on cooked vegetables, pine nuts, tofu luncheon, spaghetti etc.) 
4. Remember, you don't have to live on specialty foods like veggie burgers and tofu. All meat-based meals can be made vegan without these, think pasta with tomato sauce, ground almonds and vegetable, nachos with beans instead of mince,  nut roast instead of roast chicken etc.

There is a great book about going vegan as a teenager called Generation V. Here's a description about it:

Going vegan is the single most important thing you can do if you want to get serious about animal rights. Yet, going vegan isn't always easy when you're young. You're living under your parents' roof, you probably don't buy your own groceries, and your friends, family, and teachers might look at you like you're nuts. So, how do you do it? In this essential guide for the curious, aspiring, and current teenage vegan, Claire Askew draws on her years of experience as a teenage vegan and provides the tools for going vegan and staying vegan as a teen. Full of advice, stories, tips, and resources, Claire covers topics like: how to go vegan and stay sane; how to tell your parents so they don't freak out; how to deal with friends who don't get it; how to eat and stay healthy as a vegan; how to get out of dissection assignments in school; and tons more. Whether you're a teenager who is thinking about going vegan or already vegan, this is the ultimate resource, written by someone like you, for you.

Click here to buy the book via Amazon 

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Dairy companies continually promote dairy products for calcium and bone health. However dairy products are actually quite low in calcium, compared to foods like soy milk, almonds, nuts, apricots, broccoli, figs, and tofu.

In fact, one serving of sesame seeds has almost double the calcium as a glass of cows' milk and one serving of soymilk has almost 100 milligrams more calcium then a serving of cows' milk.

Calcium can easily be consumed by eating more fresh green vegetables, grains and nuts. Calcium deficiency can be associated with those consuming high amounts of animal protein, or high fibre diets.

Clcik here to learn more

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The foods which commonly supply the most protein in a vegan diet are pulses (peas, beans, lentils, soy products), grains (wheat, oats, rice, barley, buckwheat, millet, pasta, bread), nuts (brazils, hazels, almonds, cashews) and seeds (sunflower, pumpkin, sesame).

Examples of amounts of foods providing 10g of protein

Type of food	Quantity providing 10g protein (g)
Soya flour	24
Peanuts	39
Pumpkin seeds	41
Almonds	47
Brazil Nuts	50
Sunflower seeds	51
Sesame seeds	55
Hazel Nuts	71
Wholemeal bread	95
Whole lentils dried & boiled	114
Chickpeas dried & boiled	119
Kidney beans dried & boiled	119
Wholemeal spaghetti boiled	213
Brown rice boiled	385

Are Plant Proteins Second Class Citizens?

No, certainly not! Nutritionists once believed that plant proteins were of a poorer quality than animal proteins. And even now plant proteins are sometimes called 'second class' proteins whilst animal proteins are elevated to the 'first class' department.

This belief centred on early research on the poor laboratory rat which showed that giving extra amino acids of weanling rats reared on a plant-protein diet improved their growth. The same was assumed to be true for humans.

However, the parameters of the experiments were set in such a way that differences in the quality of plant and animal proteins were exaggerated. Also, rats and humans have different nutritional requirements, since weanling rats grow at a much faster rate, relatively, than human infants and therefore need more protein.

A comparison of rat and human milk makes the difference quite clear: protein comprises only 7% of the calorie content of human milk, while rat milk contains 20% protein. If weanling rats were fed only human milk, they would not thrive.

These tests over-estimated the value of some animal proteins while under-estimating the value of some vegetable proteins and The World Health Organisation has now abandoned this inadequate method of assessing the value of proteins to the human body.

A vegan diet can easily supply all protein requirements at any stage of life, and protein is not an issue that should be of concern to vegans, as simply by eating a balanced diet, vegans can easily get their protein recommendations.

Source: Vegan Society

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Most animals who kill for food could not survive if they didn’t, but that is not the case for humans. In fact, we would be better off if we didn’t eat meat. Many animals, including some of our closest primate relatives, are vegetarians.

Some animals partcipate in acts such as gang rape, slavery and cannibalism. Yet we do not see this as a justification for participating in such activities. Similiarly, just because other animals eat aniaml products doesn't mean we should.

Furthermore, no species other than humans drink milk from another species or at any time after infancy

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 Imagine if you had never tried rice, pasta or potatoes before. Beige, bland and boring would be the likely evaluation. Then factor in such additional information as potato leaves are deadly poisonous and any green areas on the tuber are toxic and must be sliced off. It's no wonder Brits and Europeans took many decades before accepting such suspect newcomers as potatoes and other 16th century imports. Now our cuisines are hard to imagine without them.

Tofu – although new to the western world – has a venerated Asian history going back two thousand years. Its porous blandness means it readily accepts the colours and flavours of the cook's choosing. It can be sweetened, moistened and turned into a fluffy strawberry mousse, chocolate cheesecake or glamorous piped garnish. Whiz in the blender and create creamy dressings, sauces and toppings for pasta and baked potato. Grate it and it will convince people that it's cheese. Cube it, spice it or marinate and use with stir-fries, kebabs and soups. Such blandness equals versatility and is a playful cook's best friend.

Source: Bean Supreme website

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This may be caused by a mild addiction, which comes from a low level opiate in milk, which is concentrated in cheese.

Here is an excerpt from an article in the Orlando Sentinel July 13 2003:

Of all the potentially addicting foods, cheese may be the most complex. In research studies using vegan and vegetarian diets to control cholesterol or reduce body weight, most participants soon forget the lure of ice cream, sour cream, and even burgers and chicken. But for many people, the taste for cheese lingers on and on. Yes, 70 percent of its calories may come from waist-augmenting fat, and, ounce for ounce, it may harbor more cholesterol than a steak. But that cheese habit is tough to break.

Why is cheese so addicting? Certainly not because of its aroma, which is perilously close to old socks. The first hint of a biochemical explanation came in 1981, when scientists at Wellcome Research Laboratories in Research Triangle Park, N.C., found a substance in dairy products that looked remarkably like morphine. After a complex series of tests, they determined that, surprisingly enough, it actually was morphine. By a fluke of nature, the enzymes that produce opiates are not confined to poppies -- they also hide inside cows' livers. So traces of morphine can pass into the animal's bloodstream and end up in milk and milk products. The amounts are far too small to explain cheese's appeal. But nonetheless, the discovery led scientists on their search for opiate compounds in dairy products.

And they found them. Opiates hide inside casein, the main dairy protein. As casein molecules are digested, they break apart to release tiny opiate molecules, called casomorphins. One of these compounds has about one-tenth the opiate strength of morphine. The especially addicting power of cheese may be due to the fact that the process of cheese-making removes water,lactose and whey proteins so that casein is concentrated. Scientists are now trying to tease out whether these opiate molecules work strictly within the digestive tract or whether they pass into the bloodstream and reach the brain directly.

(some paragraphs about chocolate addiction snipped)

The cheese industry is miles ahead of them, having gone to great lengths to identify people who are most vulnerable to addiction. It dubs them "cheese cravers," and tracks their age, educational level and other demographics so as to target them with marketing strategies that are tough to ignore. With a $200 million annual research and marketing budget, the dairy industry is not content to have you just sprinkling a little mozzarella on your salad. It is looking for those Americans who will eat it straight out of the package, whatever the cost to their waistlines or cholesterol levels.

At a "Cheese Forum" held Dec. 5, 2000, Dick Cooper, the vice president of Cheese Marketing for Dairy Management Inc., laid out the industry's scheme for identifying potential addicts and keeping them hooked. In his slide presentation, which was released to our organization under the Freedom of Information Act, he asked the question, "What do we want our marketing program to do?" and then gave the answer: "Trigger the cheese craving." He described how, in a partnership with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the dairy industry launched Wendy's Cheddar Lover's Bacon Cheeseburger, which single-handedly pushed 2.25 million pounds of cheese during the promotion period. That works out to 380 tons of fat and 1.2 tons of pure cholesterol in the cheese alone. A similar promotion with Pizza Hut launched the "Ultimate Cheese Pizza," which added an entire pound of cheese to a single pizza and sold five million pounds of it during a six-week promotion in 2000. The presentation concluded with a cartoon of a playground slide with a large spider web woven to trap children as they reached the bottom. The caption had one spider saying to another, "If we pull this off, we'll eat like kings."

So if you are finding it very difficlut to give up cheese, you may be mildly addicted! Because cheese can be so addictive, the best solution is not to wean yourself slowly, but to give up cheese overnight. It may be difficult at first, but after that it's a lot easier then you think. If you feel tempted to eat cheese, then print off the following facts and any time you're on the verge of eating cheese, read these.

• Cheese is made from milk, and milk almost always contains pus. You may comfort yourself by thinking that the pus is pasteurized, and certainly, pasteurization will prevent you from becoming ill, but you’re still eating pus. Look at it like this: you could stick a dog turd in an autoclave and render it biologically harmless with significant pressure and heat. That doesn't stop it being dog turd.

• Forget about being vegan – most cheeses aren’t even vegetarian. Rennet, a stomach enzyme common to most mammals, is used to make cheese by “digesting” it, leaving behind a solid and a liquid. Rennet is often harvested from the stomachs of cattle in slaughterhouses, and used directly in cheese. Though there are vegetarian rennets synthesized by other means, it is difficult to know which cheeses use vegetarian rennet and which cheeses use the stuff scraped out of the stomachs of slaughtered animals. Yum! Cow stomach excretions obviously go great with pus!

• For you to have your cheese someone had to produce the milk, and I don't mean the dairy farmer. That someone is a nameless dairy cow, identified only by a number tag on her ear, so the farmer can track her productivity and send her to the slaughterhouse when she stops producing enough milk to be profitable. She will live in a cycle of pregnancy and lactation, being artificially inseminated, then having her baby ripped away from her within a few days of birth. She will end her miserable life at a slaughterhouse where she will be hung upside down and have her throat slit, before her body is used in cheap meat and pet food, all because of your cheese addiction.

   

• Beyond being a disaster for cows, cheese is a disaster for you. A cup of diced cheddar has a whopping 532 calories, 385 of which come from fat. That includes 28 grams of saturated fat, which is 139% of amount recommended for total daily consumption by the United States government. And really, do you think those figures haven’t already been manipulated by decades of dairy and meat industry intervention in the government? To all that fat, you can add 139 milligrams of cholesterol and 820 mg of sodium. For comparison, if you decided to reach for a cup of chopped carrots instead, you’d be taking in fewer than a tenth of the total calories (52 calories for the whole cup) and less than 1 percent of the fat (3 calories versus 385 calories) than if you ate the cheese.

Cheese may taste good to you now, but really, like every other animal product, there’s no good reason to eat it. It is bad for you and bad for the animals that have to make the raw ingredients that go into it. Click here for information on how to go vegan.

Souce: Vegan Freak - Being vegan in a non-vegan world

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Most people in New Zealand are related to someone who makes their living off of aniaml agriculture. It's important to recognise that vegans do not want to make all farmers homeless. Vegans recognise that all animals deserve to have their rights recognised, both human and non human.

As more and more people go vegan there will be more and more demand for vegan products. Someone has to farm these products. Over time less and less people will be farming animals and more and more people will be farming vegetation.

So while the demand for some jobs will decrease, the demand for others will increase. This means that job opportunities will not disappear, but instead shift to products trhat do not violate the rights of animals.  

In conclusion, vegans are not trying to make people go bankrupt, and nor will veganism cause economic collapse.

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