Bobby Calves

Calves are such cute little animals and yet people kill them for their meat. How can we kill these cute little baby animals?

What Happens Bobby calves?
New born calves that are less than two weeks old who are separated from their mothers are called 'bobby calves'.
In dairy farms cows are forced to give birth to calves every year. Then almost all the calves are separated from their mother within twelve hours, and usually they don't even stay long on the farm.

New born calf

Cows form strong maternal bonds with their calves, so when they are separated from their calves they can be heard frantically crying out for their calves. They can even be heard crying out for their baby's  even days after they are separated.
Bobby calves are kept together and usually fed once a day with milk, milk replacer or colostrum (as humans want the mother cows milk for themselves). 
In Australia the calves are allowed to starve for upto 30 hours before slaughter. Research has found that this cruelty is harmful to the calves.
As the bobby calves will soon go to slaughter and are worth not much to the dairy farmers they don't get the same amount of housing, care, attention or cleanliness as the valuable bull calves being reared for veal or the replacement heifer calves (females). Often the bobby calves do not even receive basic care.

The conditions bobby calves are kept in

Transport requirements for bobby calves state that the calves should be minimum five days old before the can travel to the abattoir. As the age of a calf can't be judged accurately often they are younger than five days old.
The calves are even transported for upto ten hours, and crammed into trucks.
These are some of the problems bobby calves face while they are transported because of their young age:

1. Like all young animals bobby calves have got underdeveloped following 'behavior', or in other words the don't stay as a group or move where they are supposed to go. This makes loading and unloading difficult. The baby calves are prodded, pushed and even thrown.
2. They cannot handle stress, motion and length of transport.
3. At calf sales and during transport they are exposed to the elements and often aren't provided with bedding and have little space to lie down.
4. They are too young to go without milk for extended times.

After that the bobby calves face a painful and terrifying slaughter.

To help prevent bobby calf slaughter we should stop drinking milk and stop eating calf meat.

Slaughtered calves

 To see a video about the slaughter of bobby calves you can visit this link http://www.abc.net.au/lateline/content/2013/s3681709.htm