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The life of a dairy cow

At Vox, I specialize in writing and editing all sorts of stories about animal agriculture and the future of food, from the strange ritual of eating turkeys on Thanksgiving to the policy debates around the fate of mother pigs in the pork industry. But the lives of America’s 9.4 million dairy cows have always been […]

Apr 3, 2025 - 18:03
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The life of a dairy cow
An illustrated scene with empty, green rolling pastures and a blue sky. In the center, three cows with bright yellow ear tags are contained within a milk carton shape with metal bars.

At Vox, I specialize in writing and editing all sorts of stories about animal agriculture and the future of food, from the strange ritual of eating turkeys on Thanksgiving to the policy debates around the fate of mother pigs in the pork industry. But the lives of America’s 9.4 million dairy cows have always been especially close to my heart, and to many people who care about farm animals, for reasons that will become clear as you read this comic. I’d written a bit about dairy cows before, but to truly do the story justice, I knew I needed to narrate and illustrate, in depth, a dairy cow’s life from birth to death (and even then, there was so much from my research that had to be left on the cutting-room floor). Once you really see it, it’s impossible to look at milk the same way again. Dairy holds an almost mythical status in American life. Generations of Americans have learned to view cow’s milk as a nutritional elixir, as essential for growing children as it is for fortifying bones in aging adults.Many of us grow up learning that milk comes from places like this, full of friendly farmers and contentedly grazing cows.But like virtually all US animal agriculture today, dairy comes from factory farms that squeeze animals for maximum milk output at minimal cost. Yet there’s something uniquely weird about dairy, a basic truth that predates factory farming. Dairy is the practice of mass producing another mammal for its milk: All mammals make milk for their babies, but no other animal habitually drinks another species’ milk.For a cow to make milk, a calf must be born — a basic law of biology that many people don’t know. And for humans to drink her milk, the cow’s baby must be taken away. The story of dairy is a story of cultural forgetfulness — how we’ve pushed the intimate biological process of milk production out of our collective psyche, turning animals into hyper-commodified industrial inputs. As the author Kathryn Gillespie put it in her book The Cow with Ear Tag #1389, it is above all a story of how “violence against certain lives and bodies can become so normalized that it is not viewed as violence at all.”In recent decades, the US dairy industry’s swift consolidation has concentrated the overwhelming majority of America’s 9.4 million dairy cows onto mega dairies — operations each housing thousands or tens of thousands of cows. Cows here spend their lives in barns with concrete flooring or dirt pens, with little to no time on pasture — nothing like the picture on a milk carton. These operations are known for their colossal environmental impacts: methane emissions, air and water pollution from the sheer volume of cow manure, and foul odors permeating nearby communities.As food historian Anne Mendelson writes in her book Spoiled: The Myth of Milk as Superfood, a cow’s life is defined by the dairy industry’s “endless maneuvers meant to get around the limitations of bovine digestion, reproduction, and lactation.” From the industry’s perspective, a cow is less an animal than a technology for making milk. Her brief life revolves around continuous reproduction. Today, it’s exceedingly rare for a dairy cow to breed naturally. Instead, she’s artificially inseminated with a rod used to deposit semen into her uterus. Bovine sperm, an “internationally traded commodity” and linchpin of the dairy industry, Gillespie explains, is sourced from specialized companies that extract semen from bulls, freezing it in liquid nitrogen. “A single ejaculation,” Mendelson notes, “can be extended in the laboratory to produce enough diluted semen for several hundred inseminations.”Nine months later, a calf is born. Holsteins, the iconic, black-and-white spotted cows dominant in US dairy farming, can be prone to difficult births due to their breeding, so sometimes need human help for the delivery. A newborn calf lies on the ground — wet, fuzzy, vulnerable. The mother starts licking her baby immediately, memorizing her scent, bringing her nervous system to life, flooding both animals with pleasure chemicals. The dairy industry has sometimes propagated the idea that dairy cows are “bad mothers” who don’t care about their babies — that their maternal instincts were bred out. These claims, at odds with both science and common sense, have fallen out of favor. “It’s a misunderstanding of evolution,” bovine veterinarian James Reynolds, a retired professor at Western University's vet school, told me. Dairy cows “are very good mothers.” They eagerly nurse and protect their calves, and often bellow long after separation. Cows are some of the sweetest creatures on Earth — deeply social herd animals who, given the chance, form long-term bonds. It’s perhaps for this reason that dairy farms rush to take calves away from their mothers. The longer they remain together, the more painful the separation. After a fleeting chance to meet her calf, the mother’s baby is gone, a somber ritual repeated more than 9 million times yearly across the country.The calf is moved to a hutch, a small, crate-like enclosure where she’ll spend her first six to 10 weeks of life in solitude. She won’t see her mother again. Instead of maternal milk, she’ll be bottle-fed milk replacer, while her mother’s milk is bottled and sold. “The research is clear that hutches are not good for calves,” Reynolds said. “They’re too small, and they don’t allow social interaction, which is important for development of psychology and physiology.”Young calves endure painful procedures that cause both immediate and chronic suffering. Veterinary and industry guidelines recommend using anesthetic, though it’s not required by law in the US, and these are still usually administered without pain relief. Ears punctured to place ID tags. De-horning with hot irons. Castration.Male calves, who can’t make milk, are an inconvenience for the dairy industry. They’re quickly sold for beef or veal. Frightened newborn male calves, umbilical cords still attached, are a routine sight at livestock auctions across the country — unforgiving spaces where “animals are unloaded, pushed around, reloaded, and hauled away,” to be killed for their meat, journalist Jessica Scott-Reid wrote in a 2024 Vox story.At some farms, particularly smaller ones, male calves can be worth so little that they’re shot and discarded. In bucolic Vermont, known for its family dairy farms, selling calves for veal often isn’t worth the transportation costs, Jason Bolalek, an animal advocate who’s rescued dozens of male calves in the state, told me. Between 2019 and 2022, Bolalek went from farm to farm across Vermont, seeking unwanted calves that he could place at animal sanctuaries. One farmhand, tasked with killing newborn males, “went at length talking about how he doesn’t want to do it,” Bolalek recalls. “He was ready to give me as many as I could take — it would alleviate him from having to shoot another calf.”A female calf sometimes shares the males’ fate as meat. But more often, she’ll become a dairy cow like her mother. Mega dairies often ship truckloads of newborn female calves on grueling journeys, to be raised on dedicated facilities called “calf ranches” until they’re old enough to get pregnant — a form of hyper-specialization that’s accompanied dairy industry consolidation. At just a few days old, a calf born on a Wisconsin dairy farm might be trucked more than 1,000 miles to the Southwest, receiving no food or water, facing overcrowding, jostling, falls, and extreme temperatures. Like all farm animals in transit, these calves are treated as cargo, making transport a miserable experience. At the calf ranch, rows of hutches stretch to the horizon, each holding a baby in isolation. By 12 to 15 months old, the heifers — female cows who have not yet given birth — are impregnated and shipped back to dairy farms before giving birth.Fresh from her first birth, a cow’s body is already being prepared for her next pregnancy. Modern cows have been bred to produce nearly 8 gallons of milk per day on average, the equivalent of a human running one to two marathons a day. It’s more than five times what dairy cows made in the 1940s, and far beyond what a calf would drink. The industry is still pushing to increase these yields. These gains have allowed the US to produce dramatically more milk with fewer cows — a shift that has shrunk dairy’s carbon footprint. But astronomical milk output takes a severe toll on a cow’s body, forcing her to “channel tremendous — indeed, freakish — amounts of energy from her feed into the sole purpose of making milk,” Mendelson writes. Two to three times per day, a cow is hooked up to an automated milking machine. Some farms are embracing fully robotic milking systems, no human labor required. Two to three months after giving birth, while still being milked, the cow will be artificially inseminated again. She’ll remain lactating for most of her life, and simultaneously pregnant much of that time, a cycle that depletes calcium from her bones and makes her susceptible to mastitis, a sometimes debilitatingly painful infection in the udders. Her grassy diet is supplemented with high-energy commodity crops like grains and soybeans, which can wreak havoc on her metabolism.As long as a dairy cow is alive, she’ll endure more rounds of pregnancy and separation. She might cry for her vanished calf, trying to locate her with her voice. She moves through a world that makes little sense to her, built to wring profit from her body. She can move around within her barn, but many behaviors important for her welfare — grazing, long walks, synchronizing activities with her herd — are constrained or impossible. Social bonds routinely break, as cows are regrouped based on their pregnancy or lactation status. Some show signs of stress and frustration, like rolling their tongues repetitively around their mouths. At some farms, cows are tethered by their necks — the worst housing system for cow welfare, but one that’s more common on romanticized small dairies. “That was really startling about Vermont,” animal photojournalist Jo-Anne McArthur told me. “I went into one of those cute little red barns, and young cows were chained by their necks all winter.”A modern cow typically cycles through two or three pregnancies before her fertility declines and health problems mount. Concrete floors, heavy udders, and an unnatural diet put stress on her hooves, predisposing her to lameness. She might become a “downer cow,” unable to stand at all. “Dairy cows probably experience the worst welfare” of any animal in the American food system, along with mother pigs, Adrienne Craig, a staff attorney and senior policy associate at the nonprofit Animal Welfare Institute, told me. A cow’s natural lifespan is 15 to 20 years. But today, her body is broken by dairy farming by age 5 or 6 — the equivalent of a human in her 30s.At that age, she’s considered “spent” and sent to slaughter or sold at auction — a terrifying place for a depleted, sometimes disabled cow. “In the grand scheme of animal agriculture in the United States, auctions are some of the most horrible places,” Craig said. Because only specialized slaughterhouses accept dairy cows, Craig added, she might be trucked especially far. “For an animal that has mastitis, whose udders are leaking and is lame, and has just gotten done being milked for 10 months, it's not a very happy existence.” At the slaughterhouse, she’ll arrive exhausted, often lactating, pregnant, or both. If she has trouble walking, she’ll be pushed, prodded — even dragged — toward the slaughter line. In her last moments, if she’s lucky, she’ll be stunned unconscious with a captive bolt gun to her forehead, though amid the chaotic speed of the kill floor, stunning sometimes fails. She’ll be hoisted upside down on one leg, bled out through her throat, and skinned, her dismembered body processed into cheap hamburger meat. Back at the dairy, the flow of milk production doesn’t miss a beat. The cow has already been replaced by a young heifer, fresh from the calf ranch.Most of what’s described in this comic is just what’s legal and standard — but stories abound of outright animal abuse in the dairy industry, too. Most people in the industry don’t want to hurt animals. But the economics of dairy, and the cows’ commodity status, make it impossible not to. Dairy depends on mind-boggling levels of waste — a conveyor belt churning through resource-intensive, 1,500-pound mammals as though they were corn husks. It’s a staggeringly inefficient way of producing food, and it also, as shown by this past year’s bird flu outbreaks among dairy cows, poses profound zoonotic disease risks. A century ago, when nutrition science was crude and agriculture far less efficient, investing in intensified dairy production might have looked sensible. Today, even as the myth of cow’s milk as a superfood has been debunked and its ethical problems become apparent, dairy remains shored up by decades of government investment and cultural imagery. “People think there’s no death involved,” McArthur said. In an atomized world, many Americans are being nostalgically pulled back to cow’s milk — a connection to a real-live animal, however remote she might be from most people today. But dairy cows have been so extensively engineered as to become biological factories. Why insist on keeping these manufactured creatures in our food system at all? We have plenty of alternatives to cow’s milk. And we can evolve beyond a system that exploits motherhood and discards the vulnerable. We just need the courage to leave it behind.

Sources and further reading:

• Spoiled: The Myth of Milk as Superfood, by Anne Mendelson

• The Cow with Ear Tag #1389, by Kathryn Gillespie

• Americans are drinking more cow’s milk. Here’s why that’s a problem. (Vox)

• 9 charts that show US factory farming is even bigger than you realize (Vox)

• Big Milk has taken over American schools (Vox)

• The truth about organic milk (The Atlantic)

• What happens at livestock auctions? (Vox)

• “I just want to leave with the calf”: The US activist befriending farmers (The Guardian)

• Newborn dairy calves endure long, grueling journeys across the United States (Animal Welfare Institute)

• Regrouping induces anhedonia-like responses in dairy heifers (JDS Communications, a journal of the American Dairy Science Association)

• Don’t mind milk? The role of animal suffering, speciesism, and guilt in the denial of mind and moral status of dairy cows (Food Quality and Preference journal)

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