Accordion test

Some dairy herds in the UK will graze outside between April and September, providing the weather allows, but will be confined to sheds for the remaining six months with no access to the outdoors. An increasing number of dairy cows (currently around 20%) are being kept in ‘zero grazing’ systems. This means they are kept permanently indoors, never feeling the grass beneath their hooves, and fed a high-concentrate diet of grains and cereals.

These cows were rescued from the farming industry. Jo Anne McArthur / We Animals

Take action for cows

These sheds are typically barren, concrete cubicles that ignore all natural instincts and behaviours, such as playing, grazing, and socialising. Housing cows in close proximity also allows contagious diseases to spread and worsen over time, and frustration behaviours to appear such as aggression and bullying.

In natural conditions, a mother cow stores approximately 2 litres of milk in her udders to feed her calf. But on dairy farms, cows are expected to produce unnatural quantities of milk, leaving her to carry as much as 20 litres in her udders at any one time. Producing so much milk takes a huge toll on her health and ability to fight infections or recover from injuries.  On dairy farms, most pregnancies (over 90%) are induced by artificial insemination. This process is intrusive and traumatic for cows, yet inexperienced farmers are allowed to practice the technique on live animals. This is often followed by potential calving difficulties where semen from large bulls is used to produce large calves, which the mother’s bodies cannot cope with. In some cases, permanent nerve damage leaves the cows’ unable to stand and doing the splits. The industry response? To shackle their hind legs together so that cows can continue walking to the milking parlour.