05/08/15 Mothers on Farms
Animal Friends call for Mother's Day celebration
- Cows have milk for their own children, hens produce eggs for chickens: They are the same as human mothers.
Mother's Day is celebrated every year on the second Sunday in May. Even though the bond between a mother and a child is appreciated as something very special, people are the only ones who deny motherhood to other species. Animal Friends invite everyone on that day, May 10, to get informed also about mother cows, hens and pigs, i.e. all mothers, as motherhood is equally important to every mother, independent of her species.
Other animals have deep meaningful bonds with their mothers, as humans do, however, mothers are mercilessly used as biological machines on farms. Cows carry their children for 9 months and breastfeed them nine to twelve months as human mothers do. Cows produce milk for the same reason as human mothers: in order to feed their children. But, millions of cows are subjected to cruel cycle of permanent pregnancy, often through artificial insemination, in order to produce milk for human consumption. Calves do not grow up next to their mothers. The cows low and cry when their children are brutally taken away. Male calves end up in slaughter houses as veal, whilst young cows, as well as their mothers, are plugged into milking machines, genetically manipulated and often treated with medicines in order to be forced to produce four and even five times more milk than they would do naturally for their child. Cows become slaves because of their female bodily functions - they are being exploited simply because they are mothers and because they breastfeed.
Every year in the world around five billion female hens get put in prisons in order for their reproductive system to be exploited. Every year the egg industry billions of newly-born unwanted male chicks get through suffocation or getting ground alive. In nature, after a few laid eggs, mother hen will start to sit on them in order for chicks to be born. Whilst still inside the shell, chicks form a bond with their mother and this is kept until they grow up. In hen farming, eggs are being taken away daily in order to entice the hens urge to make up this loss and continue to lay eggs. During this, the hens through constant physical suffering also suffer neurological abuse by deliberate moult and by the lighting-alteration which induces them to lay more eggs. They are also being denied their instincts to motherhood and natural reproduction.
Another example is of the mother pig who is very caring. Newborn piglets learn to run, following their mother's voice, and mother pigs sing to their young while feeding them. Some time after giving birth, the mother pig also looks after other pig's piglets. However, when bred on farms, the mother pigs spend their lives captive, on wet concrete floors covered in faeces. When they are old enough to give birth, they are artificially inseminated and locked up for the whole of the pregnancy in cages that are too small for them to turn around in or to lie down in comfortably. After giving birth, the mother pigs are moved into cages with a restricted additional concrete area where they can feed their piglets. Even though in nature piglets would be growing up next to their mothers for a few months, on farms they separate them from their mothers after less than a month in order to end up in slaughter houses as pork or continue to live the agony of factory farming. Mothers are inseminated again and the circle of forced breeding and captivity continues. Because they're missing their piglets and because they can't do anything except stare at the bars in front of them, mother pigs often become severely neurologically damaged or maddened and neurotically chew on the bars of their cage. After three or four years their exhausted bodies end up in slaughter houses.
Animal Friends Croatia invite everyone to to consider animals which cannot fulfil their natural right to bonding with their child in motherhood on Mother's Day, and to prepare a vegan dish and celebrate mothers of all kinds in this way.