Clothes by Cows

Leather from Cows:

Truck driver cruelly handling cows in the Indian state of Tamil

    Leather can be made from many different animals, including cows.  Much of the leather industry is places in developing countries such as India or China, where laws against the cruel treatment of animals is non-existent. In an investigation conducted by PETA in India, "workers break cows’ tails and rub chili peppers and tobacco into their eyes in order to force them to get up and walk after they collapse from exhaustion on the way to the slaughterhouse" (peta.org).  The slaughter of cattle has been banned in some states of India such as Delhi, Gujarat, Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, Punjab, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh.

However, in the U.S., the millions of cows that are slaughtered have to endure the horrid conditions of the factory, such as extreme crowding, castration, branding, tail-docking, and dehorning without ANY form of anesthetic. It is also common that cows have their throats cuts, are skinned, and dismembered while still conscious. 

Leather is a highly important source of income for the meat industry and with every item made of leather that a person purchases,  it sentences an animal to a lifetime of torture. 

In Their Place

Cows cannot give consent:


 Imagine asking a mother if you could take her breast milk for billions of people to drink.

 Imagine someone raping her then steal her baby. Imagine asking a woman if you could manipulate her reproductive system into a baby-making, milk-producing machine.

Imagine asking a woman if you could use her body, her flesh, and her secretions for your taking.

What do you think the answer would be? NEVER.

      Would anyone want their reproductive system or their body to be used for someone else's pleasure and profit? Would anyone want their body to be taken from their control without their consent and basically used as a machine? There are NO morally acceptable reasons to use someone's body as a resource, much less someone who cannot give consent. Just because cows cannot defend themselves does not give anyone the right to manipulate and torture their bodies.





     To give a piece of my own opinion, it deeply saddens me as a woman to know that other females are being abused this way. Just because cows are not human, they are still persons who have the right to maintain control over their own bodies and reproductive systems. Equality must take place now. 

Got Pus?

 Cows milk is a product of cruelty:

    Farmed animals do not get to reproduce naturally. They regularly get artificially inseminated, meaning semen is injected into the dairy cow's vagina.
    Here is how it is done:

   When a cow is inseminated, she is restrained by what is commonly referred to as the "rape rack". However the use of the word "rape" carries a lot of emotional baggage, insemination is in every way sexual assault of a non-human. Her anus and vagina are forcibly penetrated and bull's semen is injected, (which is also obtained without consent from the bull... yes, they masturbate the bull).

   I could go a little more into depth as to why artificial insemination is in every way rape, however it may get too graphic and perhaps uncomfortable.

Why do they do this?

   Well, what you may not know is that they impregnate the cow over and over against her will in order for her to continue lactating. As for the babies that she births, they are used as meat if they are males or as dairy cows if they are females. Cows cannot even nurse their calves because they are separated from each other after one day! Instead, the calves are fed milk replacers while the milk that the mother produces is sold to humans. Just because they are animals does not mean the separation between mother and infant is not emotionally traumatizing.
   The cycle for the female baby begins again when the calf is inseminated at the ripe age of 1 year old... After about 4 to 5 years, when its milk production begins to slow down, it is sent to slaughter for meat.
 
Disease by Milking:

     A very common disease among dairy cows is called Mastitis. It is the excruciatingly painful inflammation of the milk-producing gland, or the mammary gland. Symptoms are not always visible, so the somatic cell count (SCC) in the milk has to be tested in order to tell if it is infected.

    Somatic cells include white blood cells —also known as “pus”—are produced as a means of combating infection and are shed from the lining of the udder.

"The SCC of healthy milk is below 100,000 cells per milliliter; however, the dairy industry is allowed to combine milk from all the cows in a herd in order to arrive at a “bulk tank” somatic cell count (BTSCC). Milk with a maximum BTSCC of 750,000 cells per milliliter can be sold. A BTSCC of 700,000 or more generally indicates that two-thirds of the cows in the herd are suffering from udder infections" (peta.org).

This means, in a glass of milk there can be up to 135 million pus cells.

  Got pus?