What’s Wrong With Dairy Products and Eggs?

These animals, who want to lay eggs for the purpose of having chicks and want to produce milk for their babies, are instead treated like production units. They endure abuses that would warrant felony cruelty-to-animals charges if dogs or cats were the victims. The dairy and egg industries spend hundreds of millions of dollars every year to paint their products as wholesome and natural, thus keeping most Americans in the dark about what goes into every glass of milk and every package of eggs.

Dairy Farms Egg-Laying Hens

They don’t want people to know that the veal industry—which chains baby cows inside tiny dark crates and slaughters them when they are just a few months old—relies on a dairy industry that has no use for male calves. They don’t want people to know that chickens raised for eggs are crammed into cages so small they can’t even spread a single wing and are starved for weeks to shock their bodies into another laying cycle.

Milk Facts

• Like all female mammals, cows produce milk for one reason—to feed their own babies.
• Veal is a “byproduct” of the dairy industry. Male calves are taken from their mothers within a day of birth; all calves raised to become veal are the children of dairy cows
• “Organic” dairy farms are often even worse than conventional dairy farms: Mother cows are still forcibly impregnated and forced to live mired in dirt and feces, and their babies are still taken from them. Also, organic farms don’t always treat sick animals because medications would prevent them from being able to sell the milk as organic. Instead, they often simply keep sick and physically compromised animals around so that their milk can be sold to conventional dairies.
• Researchers have shown that dairy-product consumption can lead to ailments including asthma, acne, diabetes, and even osteoporosis. Learn more about cow’s milk consumption and human illness.

Egg Facts

• Chickens’ eggs are the byproduct of a chicken’s “menstrual” cycle. If fertilized, they would produce baby chicks.
• Male chicks are worthless to the egg industry, so every year millions of them are tossed into trash bags to suffocate or are thrown alive into high-speed grinders called “macerators.”¹
• Egg-laying hens are all eventually slaughtered for their flesh. Their weak and emaciated bodies are made into soup or dog and cat food, or they are fed back to other chickens.
• “Free-range” eggs are a marketing ploy—the free-range label is not subject to any USDA regulations, so “free-range” chickens endure miserable conditions, just as all animals used for food do.²

No one likes to see animals suffer, and as more people learn about the reality of dairy products and egg farming, they are replacing cow’s milk with soy and rice milks and are swearing off eggs for good. Visit VegCooking.com for delicious dairy product- and egg-free recipes.

Read more about eggs.
Read more about milk.