[quadrangle]

> mildly disturbing

That's if you merely think about the concept for a moment. If you bother considering it any further or make any effort to consider the cow's (mother's) experience, you should (if you're not a sociopath) find it far beyond mild disturbance.

Death itself is wasteful but isn't as tragically unethical as the specific aspect of taking a mother's offspring away, which hits perhaps the most powerful low-level aspect of mammalian experience. That we then go kill them is appalling in a human principle (in that we understand the whole picture). Killing them in front of the mother would be a further level of horror that I assume doesn't typically happen (Aside from the gratuitous torture, I bet that would increase cortisol levels in the milk).