Viva! goes behind the scenes on UK dairy farms and exposes the pain and suffering that goes into Cadbury’s milk chocolate – and all dairy products. By Kat Affleck, Campaigner
Death by Chocolate
Indulgence, luxury, happiness – all connotations of Cadbury milk chocolate for many people. But the jovial, upbeat advertising does not reflect the dark side of dairy production that Viva! recently exposed. Our major investigation took place over
four months on over 15 UK dairy farms that supply Cadbury. We captured on tape the lives of dairy cows and the fate of their calves, shown in our campaign film A Calf and a Half. The footage, received national media coverage in The Sunand the Daily Mail Online and on BBC One and the number of viewings on YouTubekeeps on climbing. On one farm, a beautiful little calf
just a few days old bellows incessantly from a stone shed. He is distraught because he has just been separated from his mother. “He won’t be shouting much longer,” says the farmer. The calf is then taken to the back of a waiting trailer, the contents of which make gruesome viewing – a large cow and several calves, all dead. The driver picks up the calf and places him on top of the pile of corpses, climbing up after him, taking a revolver from his pocket as he does so. He levels the weapon at the animal’s head: “For God’s sake keep still,” he says with irritation as the calf tries to balance on the mound of dead bodies. BANG! And the tiny creature collapses in a heap. Like thousands of other male calves born into the dairy industry,
8 viva!life
this little animal is an unprofitable by- product, just like the over 100,000 calves who are disposed of each year. For some there is a different fate – veal farms or grown on to become cheap meat. Calves are born so their mothers will
produce milk and birth itself can be stressful enough. Calving difficulties are common and a ‘jack’ is often used to
wrench the calf from the mother – the distress is painfully obvious. Like all big mammals, cows have strong maternal instincts and want to protect and care for their young. In our footage, a newly- delivered mother greets her new baby with licks. A voice can be heard: “That’s what she wants!” But the tenderness is short lived because within 48 hours mother and calf are separated, permanently and left calling out to each other but to no avail. What we filmed was not the cruel
actions of just one company but of an entire industry. Everything we filmed is typical of all dairy farming. Dairy cows are portrayed as
having an idyllic life when the reality is a million miles away – the exploitation of one of nature’s most miraculous events for profit. Like us, a cow has to give birth to produce milk but she is kept in a constant annual cycle of pregnancy, birth and re- impregnation so she will lactate.
Natural selection has produced cows with extraordinary milk output of over 7,000 litres annually. Humans demand the lot and so the obscenely stressful practice of separating mother and calf continues year after year and the age-old, powerful instincts of both are denied. Milk is what it’s all about and
modern cows produce 10 times what they naturally would for a calf. One farmer boasts of his cows producing up to 39 litres a day. The majority of cows in the UK are black and white,
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