Cows on U.S. dairy farms once produced an average of 10,000 to 15,000 pounds (milk is often measured in pounds) a year but now are bred and engineered, often through hormones, to produce 30,000 to 40,000 pounds a year.
"When my parents first started, most of these farms had 30 or 40 cows," the farmer at Minisink said. "People milked by hand or the early milking machines. Everybody started switching over to automatic milking machines and vacuum systems. The cow was milked in the pail and then the milk was dumped into the milk can. The can held 100 pounds, 12 and a half gallons. The cans were put in a cooler and then you took the cans to the local creamery. There was a creamery here in Unionville, one in Westtown, one in Johnson, one in Slate Hill. Slowly the creameries started closing up. In the early '60s they switched over to the bulk tanks. Instead of cans the milk was piped into a bulk tank that cooled it off. A truck came and picked it up. When that happened, a lot of farms went out of business. People did not invest in the bulk tanks. They just quit."
Sherry Colb writes: "The animal we consume may already be dead, but other animals who will be created and used for food in the future are not. By consuming the dead animal (or products, such as dairy and eggs, that necessarily involve the killing and hurting of animals) right now, we demand that more animals be killed tomorrow. ... In essence, buying and consuming products is how we communicate as consumers to producers, and the message is this: 'Keep making your product, and I will keep buying it.' [W]hen a person demands a type of product, he becomes morally implicated in the production of that type of product."
"[W]e are invested in seeing the consumption of animal products as normal," Colb writes. "We are inclined to rationalize what we do, and we experience what social psychologists call 'cognitive dissonance' when we sense a conflict between our own regular, day-to-day behavior and our deeply-held values."
A society that sees all life as sacred, including the lives of animals, no longer exploits life, including that of other human beings and the ecosystem, for personal empowerment, pleasure or profit. Ceasing to be omnivores, we cease to be numb. We restore balance not only to the earth -- animal agriculture is the primary engine behind the ecological devastation of the planet -- but to our lives. We break down the emotional walls that permit us to exploit living beings and kill them.
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