The World Peace Diet: Eating For Spiritual Health And Social Harmony

116 / the world peace diet
and justifying the whole horrific thing by mythologizing it: the Lord
promising us the land of milk and honey. This violent theft of milk from
enslaved mothers planted seeds of war and exploitation that are tragically
almost completely invisible. Today, our culture takes milk for
granted! It is aggressively promoted around the world. How can we ever
hope for peace when we practice such shameful violence on such a massive
scale?
Four Pathways to Hell
The calves taken from their mothers are always destined for brutal mistreatment,
and the mother cow certainly has an awareness of this.
Animals are remarkably sensitive, as countless cultures have recognized
and as scientific evidence is increasingly showing. Mother cows are
aware that the hands that confine and rape her and push her so hard for
her milk cannot mean well for her children. The dairy-born calf will go
down one of four doomed pathways.
If she is a female, she may be raised to be, like her mother, a slave
in the dairy. She will be removed from her mother as early as possible
so as not to waste the mother’s marketable milk. She will be dehorned,
usually by the use of a red-hot electric iron applied to her horn buttons.
This is described in a modern dairy management textbook:
. . . lay the calf on its side and put your knee on the neck. . . . The
dehorner has to be left on the button for approximately five to twenty
seconds. The time will seem longer, because of the combined
unpleasantness of burning hair and a struggling calf . . . dehorning
may be complete . . . when you hear a squeaking sound as the
dehorner is twisted. It is the sound of the dehorner tip rubbing
against the bone of the skull. 11
According to the dairy industry, about half the calves are born with
“too many” teats on their udders, and these extra teats, which are
“unsightly” and may interfere with the electric milking machines, are
also removed from the calves with no anesthetic, as described again in
the dairy management textbook: “Grasp the teat between your thumb