Isn't veal a rare cruelty I can just avoid?
Short answer: Veal is made of dairy. Veal calves are the male babies the milk industry can't use, so buying milk creates the calf veal is made from.
Males give no milk and are the wrong breed for beef, so they are surplus. The industry's answer to surplus males is veal, or, where there's no veal market, being shot within hours of birth. Buying milk creates the calf.
Compassion in World Farming, Veal Calves
The objection
“Veal is a niche, old-fashioned cruelty. I never buy it, so it’s nothing to do with me.”
The answer
Veal is no niche. It is the by-product of milk. Every dairy cow must give birth every year to keep producing, and roughly half her calves are male. Males give no milk and are the wrong breed for beef, which makes them surplus, and the dairy industry’s solution to surplus males is veal (CIWF). If you buy dairy, you create the calf that veal is made from. The two cannot be separated.
For decades the answer was the veal crate: a single calf chained in a wooden box too narrow to turn around, kept on an iron-deficient liquid diet to keep the muscle soft and the flesh fashionably pale, deliberately making the animal anaemic. The EU banned the crate (in force across the bloc since 2007; illegal in the UK since 1990). But it is still legal in much of the world, and even “improved” systems rear calves in barren group pens on slatted floors before slaughter at a few months old.
There is a darker end of the same problem. Where there is no veal market at all, male calves have simply been shot within hours of birth as worthless waste, a practice the UK industry was still doing to tens of thousands of calves a year as recently as the late 2010s (CIWF).
So “I just avoid veal” misses the mechanism. The cruelty is not a product on a shelf you can step around. It runs through every glass of milk. Avoiding the veal while buying the milk funds the very thing you’re trying to dodge.