A month or so ago, freelance journalist Alison Waters approached me to contribute to a Mother’s Day feature she was writing for the online alt-media magazine The Scavenger on why vegan mothers oppose the dairy industry. Although it was somewhat out of my normal ambit as a health professional, I jumped at the chance to explain the ethical arguments against consuming the lactation fluids of any mammal besides one’s own mother (or a willing human milk donor).
You can read Alison’s article, which also features insights from a vet, an emeritus professor of animal behaviour, and several mums, right here. The article obviously touched a nerve, as it has already had 4177 hits at the time of writing this post.
I’ve found that very few people even pause to wonder about what the life of a dairy cow is like, or whether there are any ethical issues involved in dairy product consumption. And I know that when I first cut meat out my diet at the age of 15, I still included dairy products because I figured that if the cow wasn’t being killed in order for me to obtain her milk, then there was no moral problem. Boy, was I wrong about that.
I wanted to share my full responses to Alison’s questions, which didn’t make it into the article for length reasons. Here are the questions Alison asked me, and my unabridged answers:
How does your experience as a mother shape your perspective of the dairy industry and its treatment of cows and bobby calves? Was your opinion of the industry influenced by the birth of your first child (or subsequent children)? If so, how?
Like all mothers I’ve spoken to, the experience of bringing new life into the world and nurturing those new lives changed me forever as a person.
I breast fed both my children for over 3 years, and although they’re now 16 and 12 respectively, I still vividly remember the joy and delight I felt when we settled down for a feed – knowing that this magical substance that my body made to order, without any conscious input required from me, was providing for all their nutritional needs; watching their blissed-out faces; exchanging looks and smiles and coos…
I can reflect on this experience in a way that is unique to humans (as far as we know), but I don’t fool myself that this experience is uniquely human. It’s an intrinsic part of a biological scheme geared toward creating a strong bond between mother mammals and their offspring, to cause offspring to stay close to their mothers, and mothers to protect their offspring even at risk of their own lives, until those offspring are old enough to fend for themselves, and to reproduce, thus ensuring the species’ survival.
Mother Nature brews up a cocktail of powerful hormones and other brain chemicals that conspire to make us feel deeply bonded with our babies even before they are born; and after birth, to fall deeply and passionately in love with them so we will put their needs for care, feeding and nurturance above our needs for food, sleep, personal space and adult time!
In that sense, a mother cow is a mother human is a mother of any mammalian species.
And that, in my view, renders the dairy industry’s treatment of mother cows and their calves the most unconscionable set of acts that we humans perpetrate on our fellow earthlings. From the forcible artificial insemination of cows, to milking them throughout most of their 9-month pregnancy (an incredibly stressful practice which leaves their bodies so nutritionally depleted that their natural life-span of 20 years is truncated to just 5 or 6), to the abduction of their babies within days of birth – females to replace worn-out ‘milkers’; males to end up in a pet food can or on the table of a fine-dining restaurant as ‘veal’ – the dairy industry abuse of cows and their calves is a betrayal of our common bond as mammals who are deeply and powerfully driven to nurture our young.
And all so that humans can get their hands on a food whose consumption is linked to iron deficiency in infants and toddlers; a higher risk of autoimmune diseases including type 1 diabetes and Crohn’s disease; and prostate cancer!
After both my children were born, I experienced nightmares in which they were taken away from me; in talking to other mothers, I’ve discovered that this is not an uncommon fear. But my nightmare was just that – a bad dream that I was able to shake off once I awoke. Mother dairy cows live this nightmare every time they give birth. I have heard heartrending stories of mother cows bellowing for their calves for days after they were taken away, and even attempting to hide their babies from the farmer so that they could keep them.
I don’t think there’s a mother on this planet that could not relate to the suffering these gentle animals endure, yet the dairy industry hides the barbaric reality of modern dairy management practices from unwitting consumers, who are all too willing to believe the myths of ‘happy cows’ contentedly grazing and willingly ‘giving us’ their milk rather than having it stolen from them and their babies.
As a vegan mum, what do you tell your children about the dairy industry?
From the time my children were very young, I explained to them that Mummy’s milk was for them, other mummy animals’ milk was for their babies, and it was wrong of us to steal those babies’ food. That made perfect sense to them – after all, one of the earliest lessons we teach our kids is to respect others and not take their stuff!
However, parties and school events provided some challenges, as it wasn’t so obvious to a child’s mind that this principle also applied to dairy products invisibly baked into a muffin or contained in a dip. My daughter was particularly determined to try foods that other children were eating, and I had to balance my personal ethics with my commitment to her development as an independent human being.
Fortunately, as my children grew older, my husband and I were able to have more sophisticated conversations with them about the dairy industry and the egregious abuses it commits. We have never exposed them to graphic footage, but we found books such as Ruby Roth’s That’s Why We Don’t Eat Animals very helpful in starting conversations.
They have both developed a strong sense of justice which trumps both their curiosity about what dairy ice cream and cheese taste like, and social pressure to eat what others are eating (not at all a problem for my son, who is impervious to any attempts to make him conform, but definitely a challenge for my daughter who is highly sociable).
As a nutrition professional, I also share with my children the scientific facts that contradict the dairy industry-sponsored propaganda they’re exposed to at school, positioning milk as an integral part of a healthy diet. Consuming dairy products does not give us strong bones; the countries with the highest intake of dairy products also experience the highest rate of abnormal bone fractures. And dairy products definitely do not assist with weight loss, a claim the US dairy industry was ordered to stop making when scientific evidence failed to validate it.
Our children proudly identify as vegans, and frequently take the opportunity to educate their friends and classmates about the reality behind dairy farming and other forms of animal agriculture.
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