I

"You wouldn't go up to a cow and start suckling from her udder, right?" This is a direct quote

from PETA's website regarding the correlation between cows and humans and the milk that they

each drink. While a lot of people say that these lifestyle choices are just that, individual choices,

more and more people are developing allergies and illnesses from the consumption of

milk-based products. While I believe the main purpose of the mural is advocating choosing

alternative milks for animal advocacy, it does pose a serious question. Should we really be

drinking the milk meant for another animal? Or does this milk serve a purpose for human

consumption as well. In my essay, I hope to explore not just the animal advocacy side of this

issue but also the negative side effects to our health and how all this is affecting our

environment.

II

Growing up most people were raised under the idea that a glass of milk a day was healthy and

even essential to bone health. Contrary to popular belief, you do not need dairy milk to obtain

calcium. Now a days, we have found that milk doesn't have all of those benefits anymore. Milk

used to be full of healthy bacteria for our gut, now milk is pasteurized, and that process kills the

beneficial bacteria that was once found in milk. That helpful bacteria that used to be found in

milk is also what made it so easy for our bodies to digest. Milk and dairy products are pro-

inflammatory and mucus producing. Milk increases the risks of respiratory conditions and of

many allergies. It has been found that, cow's milk protein is the most allergenic food. According

to USA Today, "approximately 60% of adults cannot digest milk." Lactose intolerance is on the

rise in recent years.

Instead of the beneficial bacteria that promotes gut health, cows are pumped with antibiotics and

hormones that are also found in the milk produced by cows. So now without the beneficial

bacterial, you are left with unnecessary fat, cholesterol and calories. While there are some

benefits to milk the bad outweighs the good.

III

"At current rates, U.S. dairy farms produce 196 billion pounds of milk a year. " Have you ever

stopped to think of the effects of such mass production has on our environment? "Globally, dairy

production accounted for 2.8 percent of all manmade climate changing gases." That study was

done in 2005 the most recent information available. Although the percentage may seem small

dairy farms to make a major impact to our environment. Dairy cows and their manure produce

greenhouse gas emissions which contribute to climate change. The emissions from these gases

lead to tainted water, air pollution and horrible odor, especially to cities where these dairy farms

are located. We currently also use ¼ of or water supply just to be able to maintain all these dairy

farms. Day.

When you add up the water used for food, water, and cleaning the facility the average dairy cow

uses 4,954 gallons of water per day. The average dairy farm has about 700 cows, that is 3.4

million gallons of water EVERY DAY. Accounting for the nine million dairy cows there are in

the U.S. alone that number is astronomical. If a gallon of milk weighs 8.6 pounds and it takes

683 gallons of water just to produce the feed for a dairy cow to produce that gallon. Although not

everyone maybe ready to completely change their lifestyle I will

leave you with this, if just one person stopped consuming dairy that person would help save

50,033 gallons of water.

IV

We have discussed health issues and environmental issues, but now I wanted to discuss what I

believe the mural is about and that is about animal advocacy. Increasingly, the public is

becoming more and more aware of the conditions for dairy cows on factory farms are cruel and

inhumane. Cows produce milk for the same reason that humans do: to nourish their young. In

order to force them to continue producing milk, to be able to produce milk for humans. Today’s

dairy cows produce up to 12 times more milk than their bodies were designed to produce.

According to John Webster, Emeritus Professor of Animal Husbandry at Bristol University,

“theamount of work done by the dairy cow in peak lactation is immense, to achieve a

comparable high work rate, a human would have to jog for about 6 hours a day, every

day.”Factories farmers operators typically impregnate them using artificial insemination very

year. Baby calves are generally torn away from their mothers within a day or two of birth, most

within 12 hours of birth. Under both circumstances it causes both the mother and the calf under

distress. Mother cows can be heard calling for their calves for days after being separated from

their calves. Male calves are stored in tight living quarters to be killed for veal, while the females

wait to grow enough to have the same fate as their mothers.

*https://freefromharm.org/farm

V. We have discussed health reasons, environmental reasons and lastly animal advocacy.

Although not all these topics are discussed within the mural I believe that murals promoting

these types of topics are just a small eye-opening experience to a person who may not have any
experience regarding the topic at hand. It starts the conversation, and gets the average person

doing their own research and getting their own information on the issues and to me that is the

best way to reach people, by allowing them to do most of the work on their own. While although

these murals may not be enough to spark mass change in the communities that these murals exist

it begins a conversation or discovery that may never have happened without the art work of the

mural. I hope to do the same with my essay to people who are reading it as the mural maybe

doing to others out there, starting a conversation and possibly beginning the self-discovery to the

affects the dairy industry has on the animals themselves, our environment and most importantly

ourselves.