confessions of a vegan

I am employed by the University's YMCA. I work in an after school program at Richard Green Central Park in South Minneapolis twice a week with a group of first graders. Last Wednesday, they were coloring in a "educational" packet about farms. I realized why, although I love working with children, I could never be an educator. The one page that upset me the most was the one about cows and milk. I was deceived my whole life thinking milk was healthy and that I should drink it. Why not, the cows make milk regardless right? So we might as well drink it. First off, milk isn't the greatest thing since sliced bread. According to PETA's website milksucks.com, 1 to 7 drops of pus can be found in a glass of milk, which is likely due to the growth hormones the cows are fed. Ew!
53% of Mexican-Americans and 90% of African-American adults are lactose intolerant, according to wrongdiagnosis.com. Those are the ethnicities that the majority of the kids I work with are. Why would we want to start them on a habit that over half of them will have problems with later in life?
The milk cows make are not for us, it is for their calves. Would now be a good time to mention that those little calves never get that milk that nature intended them to have? The calves are stripped away very soon after birth; the females are grown to become dairy cows and repeat the awful cycle, and male calves get sold as veal. MilkSucks.com states, "A cow can live 20-25 years, but a typical factory-farmed cow is “used up� in four years. Then it’s off to the slaughterhouse." How is that okay? They are kept in confined areas, not fed what they should be eating, and are made to produce way more milk than they should, just so we can drink pus and fat with our cereal?
"Back in the day", I'm sure there were family farms whose cows were taken care of and treated like cows, not used simply as objects of production. Cows now are kept in tiny cages and constantly artificially inseminated so they will keep having calves and producing milk. Growth hormones and unnatural milking schedules hurt the cows' udders and make them painful and heavy enough that they touch the ground, which causes infections and overuse of antibiotics. That is not natural, that is wrong. Was that the picture that the kids were coloring? No. They were coloring a happy cow in a field. These days, that is fiction. The kids all said how much they liked the cow. It broke my heart to think that not enough people are aware that the cows they love are not grazing grass in a sunny California field like they have been taught their whole lives.