When considering our Shavuot menu, which has traditionally been centered around dairy dishes, we should consider how cruel the modern dairy industry is. Dairy cows are forcibly, artificially impregnated annually on what the industry calls “rape racks,” so that they will constantly provide milk. Their babies are taken away almost immediately, with VERY traumatic effects.

Below is a statement from Dr Michael Klaper about this:

The very saddest sound in all my memory was burned into my awareness at age five on my uncle’s dairy farm in Wisconsin. A cow had given birth to a beautiful male calf. The mother was allowed to nurse her calf but for a single night. On the second day after birth, my uncle took the calf from the mother and placed him in the veal pen in the barn—only ten yards away, in plain view of the mother. The mother cow could see her infant, smell him, hear him, but could not touch him, comfort him, or nurse him. The heartrending bellows that she poured forth—minute after minute, hour after hour, for five long days—were excruciating to listen to. They are the most poignant and painful auditory memories I carry in my brain. Since that age, whenever I hear anyone postulate that animals cannot really feel emotions, I need only to........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)