Quite honestly these cows are all looking pretty normal and getting my milk from them seems pretty good right now.
Now. For your almond milk.
Need massive acres of trees which have to be shaken with heavy machines to get those out. Goodness. Much of it’s grown in California, so water has to be drawn into a rather dry area. And they complain cows use so much. These canals don’t look too natural to me.
Oh so natural almond milk machines. I do love it when my products need a ton of additives and processing.
So stop and jump off that high horse. You not drinking dairy won’t make you a better person. Thinking you know all about animals because you don’t eat them doesn’t make you someone to listen to. Putting a smiling cow or almond on a package isn’t gonna hurt or change anything.
why is this dumbass shit on my dash why was this recommended to me this is fucking stupid
they literally have to bleach out the blood and pus but go off ig
You guys seriously need to see real milk someday. Plus and blood? Your drinking motor oil and grease more then the stuff you claim is in milk.
How do you define “real milk”? Because according to the USDA, 1 in 6 dairy cows in the United States suffers from clinical mastitis, which is responsible the concentration of somatic cells in our milk supply. The average somatic cell count in U.S. milk per spoonful is 1,120,000, which is about one drop of pus per glass of milk. But all of this is missing the point completely. You have chosen to focus on the how “natural” cow’s milk is when compared with almond milk, which is fine, but it’s also utterly redundant. If your argument is just that cow’s milk is natural and almond milk isn’t then our response is quite simply: Who cares?
Vegans don’t avoid cow’s milk because of pus, we avoid it because it’s unethical. We avoid it because cows, like all female mammals, only produce milk when pregnant and after childbirth. Cows therefore, are restrained and forcibly impregnated so that they will produce milk. Naturally, this milk is intended to feed their calves, however, in order to take her milk, farmers separate calves from their mothers shortly after birth, causing extreme distress and sometimes resulting in prolonged depressive states. While female calves will usually join their mother on the milk production line, male calves do not produce milk and are not considered profitable for meat production, so are often killed or sent for veal production. Due to the close bond formed between cows and their offspring, it is common for the mothers of dairy calves to quite literally scream for their lost calves, sometimes for days at a time. Cows are put through this agonizing process three or four times, before they too are killed.
Aside from the horrific cruelty done to the animals themselves, dairy comes with other significant issues. Dairy is extremely resource intensive, it takes 1,000 gallons of water produce 1 gallon of milk, and almost 900 gallons for 1lb of cheese. You used California’s situation as a convenient example to bash almond milk production and how it’s causing a “drought”, as everybody always does, but while Californians use 1500 gallons of water per person per day, close to half of that is associated with meat and dairy. So even in California, where a full 82% of the world’s almonds are produced, the water use of almond production is still outweighed by meat and dairy.
Dairy production has a devastating impact on the environment too, cows produce 150 billion gallons of methane per day, and a farm with 2,500 dairy cows produces the same amount of waste as a city of 411,000 people. Consuming dairy is therefore as unsustainable as it is unethical. Given that dairy is unnecessary for our health and that there are a whole host of healthy, widely available plant based alternatives, including oat, cashew, soy, hemp and pea milk, so if you really do have an issue with almonds, then just don’t buy almond milk. For anyone who has the option to avoid it, supporting this exploitative, cruel and destructive industry is completely unjustifiable.
So you can claim it’s “natural” to industrially breed and raise millions of dairy cattle so that humans can drink the breastmilk of another species, but even if it were true, that really isn’t at all the point. Attaching pictures of evil almond milking machines as if machinery = bad is honestly laughable considering the amount of production, sterilization and pasteurization which is required to produce cow’s milk which is safe and legal to sell. What is natural has absolutely nothing to do with what is ethical; animals are exploited, commodified and eventually killed to produce dairy, that is our issue with it. Posting pictures of grazing cows isn’t exactly a compelling defence for any of that.
Oh, shit! Not the almond milk! What will I do without my almond milk?! There is literally nothing else I could possibly use in place of almond milk besides dairy milk, so I guess I’ll have to stop being vegan now, huh? Soy, oat, hemp, rice, and a plethora of nut milks just don’t exist anymore, right? Oh wait, no, that’s completely bonkers.
Half the dairy produced in the US comes from only 3% of dairy farms, huge factory farms responsible for all sorts of environmental destruction from contaminating drinking water to killing local wildlife. And the majority of the rest of them are not just small, happy family farms. So the cows you get your dairy from most likely look more like this:
Oh, hey, look at this neat dairy processing equipment they use to extract all the feces, blood, pus, and bacteria out of milk:
As far as additives, milk has been fortified with additional vitamins since longer than any of us can remember.
And nevermind the fact that you can literally make your own nut milk overnight using nothing but some water and a loosely threaded cloth.
47% of California’s water usage is associated with meat and dairy production. From the link:
“…the grain and alfalfa grown in California as food for cows, sheep, horses, pigs and goats consume at least 10 million acre-feet of water each year — three times what the almond industry uses.”
I might not “know all about animals” but I do know about the specific issues you bring up with regard to almonds vs cows as my family happens to actually live in the Central Valley of California and is literally surrounded by almond orchards and cattle as far as the eye can see. I can tell you first hand that it’s not the almonds making the local’s lives miserable. Have you ever even been there? Try driving through some time and tell me if the frequent overbearing stench of rancid, diseased manure doesn’t make you want to vomit.
