Imagine being raised for meat, fattened up, and slaughtered.
Now imagine being raised for your breastmilk, or your eggs.
In the case of milk, you are forcibly raped and impregnated. After a period of months—nine, in the case of both cows and humans—you give birth to a baby. Within hours—or days, if you’re lucky—your baby is taken from you. You won’t see it again. If born male, he usually will become veal. If female, she will be raised to replace other older cows at the dairy.
Machines are attached to your nipples, and, for a few months, the milk meant for your baby is siphoned out.
Then it starts all over.
You’ll give birth to four or five babies, and then it’s off to the 
slaughterhouse. You’ll be turned into cheap meat—of course—because your body is so weak and worn out after four years of producing seven to ten times more milk than you would in nature, and even though you’re perhaps a quarter as old as you could become. Now that you can’t give any more milk, your body is a byproduct.
If you are a chicken, raised for your eggs, you won’t have your babies taken away from you. No matter where you are, though, you will feel an intense drive to prepare for the arrival of chicks. Even in a battery cage, where there is no bedding material, you may attempt to make nests out of the body of a dead cagemate. Your eggs roll down the slanted wire floor of the cage and away from you.
After a year or a year and a half, you will be incredibly weak from your calcium-deficient diet—the creation of an egg requires many nutrients, including calcium—but in order to get a few more hundred eggs from you and the other hens, the farm will induce a period of forced-moulting by starving you. For at least five days, there is no food. Six days pass. Seven. 
The farm may go fourteen days or longer without feeding you, and if you live, you will have lost 30% of your weight. (5 to 10% of the other chickens, of course, will die, and on an average farm that adds up to thousands of birds.) You might be force-moulted one more time, or even twice, in order to get as many eggs from your tired body as possible. And then, when—like the dairy cow—you can’t produce enough of your reproductive secretions (yum), you become cheap meat—dog food, soup, or baby food. You will be less than two years old, about a tenth of your potential lifespan.
It’s odd to think that while people sometimes stop eating meat because of their concern for animals, they continue to consume animal products. Broiler chickens die at around a 45 days old, rather than languishing for a year or a year-and-a-half, and even beef cattle die a couple of years younger than those raised for dairy. Comparatively, the egg and dairy industries cause far more suffering. Think of it this way: egg-laying chickens and dairy cows are still killed for meat—they just suffer longer first.
I can think of few things more horrible in farming today than the standard methods by which we procure milk and eggs.
(And yes, I include organic and free-range stuff in this as well.)
I just got back from Peta’s press conference outside of Vancouver city hall unveiling the logo for their new campaign against Canada’s seal hunt.
They have only made it illegal to kill pups 11 days and younger!) About 325,000 are killed every March and April. Native people, on the other hand, prefer to hunt adult RING seals. They kill just 10,000 per year, and they actually HUNT them. To quote Arnaituk M. Tarkirk, an Inuit man from Kuujjuak, Quebec:
“There would be 180,000 more seals left for us to eat when they are a few years older, and also people would not have such an aversion to sealskin products as they have after seeing the way they kill the pups, so craft work made with adult seals would be more popular.” (