Mother’s Day

By Jeff Mackey

If you’re like most people, you’ll no doubt treat your mom to brunch or dinner on Mother’s Day. But this year, while you are saluting your own mom, please honor all mothers by celebrating with a meal that doesn’t include meat, eggs or dairy products. Some of the best mothers in the world are found in the animal kingdom, yet few animal moms on today’s farms are ever allowed to nurture their babies as nature intended.

For mother cows and their calves, for example, it’s love at first sight. The first minutes after birth are spent developing a bond that will last a lifetime. Their attachment and affection for each other is so deep that both mother and baby become extremely distressed if they are forced apart. Mother cows bellow in vain and their calves wail inconsolably; they cry out for each other for days. Some mother cows have even been known to escape their enclosures and travel for miles searching for their babies.

Sadly, such pitiful scenes are common on dairy farms. Mother cows are allowed to bond with and care for their calves for only a few hours before the babies are torn away so that we can have the milk that was meant to nourish them. Wide-eyed and terrified, the calves are desperate to suckle but instead are given a bottle of milk “replacer” and a short life in a veal crate (for males) or a life just like that of their sad mothers (for females). Meanwhile, the mother cows will soon be impregnated again, only to endure the same heartbreak nine months later.

If allowed, mother hens would turn their eggs as many as five times an hour and cluck softly to the chicks inside, who chirp back from within their shells. Once hatched, the chicks are shielded from predators by their protective mother’s wings. Click to continue »

By Ron O’Clair

My mother’s name was Evelyn. She died of a massive coronary when I was 16 in 1977 when she was 46.

One day she was there, and the next she was not.

As of this Mother’s Day, 41 people are directly descended from her, and continue to multiply as the years go by. She did live ling enough that she was a grandmother before she died, and would be a great-grandmother to 18 children were she alive today.

She loved all of her own children, and their children, and I know she would have had room in her heart for all those that have come since she died, she was that type of person, very giving of herself for other’s.

As Mother’s go, I suppose she was better than some, and not as good as other’s, but to me Click to continue »