Like humans, cows are strongly maternal beings who form close bonds with their young and must give birth to produce milk.
Calves are taken away from their mothers hours after being born so that the milk intended for them can be collected and sold for human consumption. Over the days following calf separation, the mothers bellow day and night, searching for their calves. They’re known to grieve for days or even weeks.
The male calves, called bobby calves, are considered useless to the dairy industry because they’ll never be able to produce milk. They are kept isolated for five days before being herded onto a truck, and sent either to a saleyard first, or directly to the slaughterhouse. Male calves can be withheld food for the last 30 hours of their lives.
Starved, confused and desperate for affection, they cry for their mothers from the holding pens of the slaughterhouse where they’ll be killed the following morning. Those who avoid the stunner or who are improperly stunned are killed while conscious. Around 700,000 male calves are slaughtered as waste products of the dairy industry every year in Australia alone.
In natural conditions, they can live up to 20 years. On dairy farms they last only 4 to 8 years, some – known as downers – succumbing to the pressure of continuous impregnation and producing up to 10 times more milk than they naturally would, the rest sent to slaughter when their milk production begins to slow down or they become too injured to continue.
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