Why Dairy is a Feminist Issue

Have you ever really stopped to think about milk?

That might sound like an odd question, but I for one grew up without questioning this foodstuff, or the marketing that surrounded it:

"Dairy = calcium = healthy bones = I’d grow up strong and happy"

It was everywhere; fun-flavoured milk, fun-flavoured yoghurts, cheese packaged as strings, bells and triangles. And it was all reinforced by the playful and colourful advertising that makes children tell their mums "I want that!", and makes mums think they’re providing nutritious treats that will support the growth of robust, healthy youngsters.

I mean...I know for a fact that if a human woman was walking around wearing earrings made of her own fermented breast milk people wouldn't think that was tasty... 😐

More often than not, advertising promoted happy cows, frolicking around in green pastures, having a great time whilst they willingly produced milk for their human friends. It's testament to the power of this advertising that I - a well-educated inhabitant of a female body - was well into adulthood before it finally struck me that I wasn’t just wandering around producing milk.

Milk is the fluid the body makes to feed a baby. Only a pregnant female produces it, and this rule applies across almost every species. It’s certainly the case for cows. This realisation led to a spiral of ugly learnings that I wish my vegetarian-self had discovered many years earlier.

The treatment of animals in our food system is surely a feminist issue, as the dairy industry just has to be the most systematic, capitalistic exploitation of the female body on the planet. Forcibly impregnated over and over until their bodies are broken, the plight of dairy cows is a real-life horror story.

So if you’re a woman, a mother, or simply someone who thinks it’s wrong to enslave a female body and exploit it for financial gain, please read on to learn where the milk in your coffee comes from…

• Female cows are forcibly impregnated, using a piece of restrictive apparatus the industry casually refers to as a ‘rape rack’, and an entire human arm shoved into their rectum

• Once artificially inseminated, they carry their babies for 9 months – just as human mothers do

• Cows are strongly maternal creatures, and would naturally spend around 10 months feeding and nurturing their babies. However, humans 'need' the milk. So on a dairy farm, the calf can’t be fed and nurtured by their mum, they’re just a by-product of an industrial process. Instead, they’re taken from her a few hours after birth

  
  

  [For any mothers reading this…just imagine that. Your newborn baby taken away from you, with no-one to help, and no way to follow. There are countless videos documenting cows fighting hopelessly to try to stop this from happening, and others showing mother and baby calling out for each other for days afterwards]

• The calf’s gender determines their fate. Girls will be housed away from their mothers and fed a milk-replacer. When they’re around 18 months old, they enter the same production cycle as their mums. Baby boys will either be shipped off to a veal market, or shot in the head. They serve no purpose in this cycle, so feeding them would be a waste of money

• With her baby out of the picture but her body ready to nurture the life she’s just created, the mother cow is now hooked up to a machine that will drain her of the milk she’s producing. Sounds quite straightforward, but it’s not...

• Selective breeding means that cows in dairy herds produce unnatural amounts of milk. Their calf would feed five or six times a day, but on a dairy farm they’re typically milked just twice a day, meaning 20 litres of milk can accumulate in their udders at any one time. This causes huge physical discomfort, including difficulty with mobility, painful mastitis, and lameness. Cows commonly have their back legs shackled together to stop them doing the splits under the weight of their udders

• Milk will be taken until the cow has no more left to give, at which point she’s likely to already have been impregnated again, and the cycle will start over, typically 3 or 4 times in her lifetime

• Cows should live for 20 years. Dairy cows live for about 6, before their exhausted bodies give up. At this point, they’ll be sold off for cheap meat

No female should endure this suffering, human or non-human. Cows feel love, pain, and the maternal bond just as we do. Enslaving them and exploiting their bodies to steal what they produce is inhumane.

We don’t need dairy. Calcium is available in so many other foods. There is no other species whose members consume the baby-milk of a different species, when they’re babies, never mind grown adults! It’s weird and unnatural.

You can take your pick of other milks. Oat, soya, coconut, rice, hemp, almond, hazelnut, pea, cashew, even POTATO! With so many other options, why subject our fellow females to such grief and suffering?

To learn more, check out investigations conducted by Animal Equality and Animal Justice Project

Please broaden your compassion to non-human females this International Women’s Day.