Mother’s Day is a time to celebrate the bond between mother and child and to show appreciation for mothers all around the world. While I enjoy spending the day with my own children, I can’t help but feel a sense of sadness knowing that for farmed animal mothers and their babies, there is no day of celebration. They barely even have the opportunity to experience the joys of the mother-child bond. Instead, mothers and their babies imprisoned in factory farms are separated shortly after the baby is born.

There is no celebration of life in the animal agriculture industry - just pain, violence and suffering. 

Female pigs are artificially inseminated and forced to live in barren, cramped cages where they are unable to even turn around. Their babies are mutilated and then taken away from them at just three to four weeks of age. Their mothers are then impregnated again. These intelligent, sentient beings are denied the chance to form a natural bond that would otherwise come so naturally to their kind. 

Just like humans, mother cows, when given the chance, form lifelong bonds with their calves. The milk they produce is intended for their young, but the dairy industry exploits this bond by taking the milk meant for their precious babies. Like pigs, cows are repeatedly artificially inseminated, and each calf is taken away at only a few days old and killed for veal or raised to be a dairy cow so their milk can be sold to humans. 

Hens are also widely denied the opportunity to bond with their young. When allowed to stay with their eggs, the bond forms even before the chicks hatch. The hen chirps to her young and they respond from inside the eggs. But hens farmed for laying eggs never get to take part in this or other natural behaviours. Their eggs are taken from them for human consumption. The male chicks who hatch in egg factory farming facilities are ground up alive almost immediately, and the females meet the same fate as their mothers, a life of misery trapped in a tiny cage.