Ears are clipped and tagged without anesthetic or painkillers.
These young calves will either be raised for veal or put into the milk production system. Both outcomes involve lives of exploitation and a premature death.
Veal calves are taken away from their mothers within minutes of being born. Their first food is colostrum from a bottle.
Unless veal crates are thoroughly cleaned on a daily basis, they can be breeding grounds for flies which plague the calves.
These cows know no pasture. Their days are spent standing on hard surfaces and as a result their hooves grow to painful lengths.
Born with ropes around her legs, she is literally enslaved to us from birth.
Other dairy cows, who have had their calves taken away, watch as the new mother cleans her baby.
The bond between mother and babe is obvious and immediate.
Dairy cows who have had their babies removed from them so that we can drink their milk, watch the new mother bond with her calf.
As the calf takes her first steps, the cows watch the humans warily.
The calf is dumped in barrow and wheeled to her home, a veal crate.
Still wet from birth, she will be added to the rows of other calves and crates, and raised in this confinement.
A lonely existence.
Painfully overgrown hooves are a result of sedentary days and the cement they stand on their whole lives.
Overgrown hooves, anxious looks.
Meanwhile, the mothers are milked through a meticulously motorized and computerized system.
The sickly, fly-covered calf we saw earlier in the day is now dead.
A calf's life.
The dead are wheeled away.
She will be reimpregnated until her body becomes exhausted from the years of giving birth and milk production. At that point, she will be sent to slaughter and sold as low-grade beef. Outside this system, she could live 20+ years but here, she will be slaughtered before her eighth birthday.
