So a group of vegetarians and animal rights types called Mercy for Animals snuck a hidden camera into a dairy farm the other day trying to get some footage of cows being mistreated, and they figure they found it.

The video below shows an example of tail-docking in progress.  Tail-docking is a procedure by which an animal’s tail is cut off for any of a variety of reasons.  The animal activists, predictably, call this “animal cruelty.”

Of course, what those animal activist types don’t know is that tail-docking is also done to PROTECT animals in some cases, especially in, say, pigs, who are apt to bite the tails of other pigs when in confinement.  And in the case of burning off horns, this is often necessary to keep the cows from injuring each other or even themselves over territorial battles.

But animal rights activists would sooner see cows living in our houses than served on our dinner plates, so this sort of thing is to be expected.  The video, meanwhile, is below, and speaking as someone who actually raised two head of cattle once, this is really not as bad as they make it out to be.  Some parts are questionable, no mistake, but some of this is hardly “dairy’s dark side”.