Got Milk?

"We can see quite plainly that our present civilization is built on the exploitation of animals, just as past civilizations were built on the exploitation of slaves."   - Donald Watson

Milk is widely recognized as a nutritious drink for people of all ages — it's a good source of protein, calcium, vitamin D, potassium and other vitamins and minerals.

As all mammals do, human infants produce hefty amounts of lactose, an enzyme that allows the body to digest lactose — without lactose, babies can't digest their mothers' nutrient-rich milk. At around age 5, lactose production decreases, possibly to help facilitate weaning.

But about 7,500 years ago in Central Europe, a genetic mutation popped up, causing some people to produce lactose well into adulthood, according to a 2009 study in the journal PLOS Computational Biology. (The mutation is also believed to have evolved a few other times and places over the last several thousand years.)

How lactose tolerance initially spread isn't entirely clear. One theory suggests pioneering farmers and their families migrated out of Central Europe with domesticated crops that weren't suited for the new environment. With poor crops and possibly contaminated water sources, they increasingly turned to cow's milk for sustenance, making it a regular part of their diet.

Fundamentally, cow’s milk is a substance designed by nature for baby cows, not for humans. We are the only species that drinks the milk intended for the young of other species, and we are the only species that insists on drinking milk beyond the time of weaning. It seems we cannot bear the thought of growing up and leaving home. Perhaps we long for infancy and the peaceful oblivion of our mother’s breast, and if hers isn’t available, then we’ll use the breast of any lactating mother, even if she’s a cow and we have to kill her babies to get to it. Just as the complete unnaturalness of humans killing and eating animals is obvious if we contemplate trying to do it without implements, so is the drinking of milk.

Milk from a cow is as necessary as milk from a pig or a horse or a giraffe. Human breast milk is the perfect food for human babies, while cow’s milk is the perfect food for baby cows. Cow’s milk naturally contains the large amount of hormones and protein needed to turn a 80-pound calf into a 1,000 pound cow in one year. That amount of protein and hormones is not only unnecessary but unhealthy for humans. Because they occur naturally, these hormones are even found in organically produced milk.

In the wild, a cow, like all mammals, will produce milk after giving birth to a baby, and does so in a classic bell curve for about seven months, beginning at less than ten pounds of milk per day, climaxing at about twenty-five pounds per day, and then tapering back to ten pounds and then to zero as the calf begins to eat solid food. On today’s dairies the newborn calf is immediately removed from the mother, causing enormous anguish to both, and the mother is artificially forced to produce from 90 to 110 pounds of milk per day for a full seven to eight months. Dairy cows are impregnated at a much younger age than would ever occur in the wild, and are kept pregnant virtually continuously, even while they are lactating from the previous pregnancy. The enormous strain of being pushed so hard to produce such abnormally large quantities of milk quickly destroys the health of these cows. Though they would naturally live twenty-five years in the wild, after about four years of this dairy abuse their “productivity” drops off. They are then forced to endure the brutality of the slaughterhouse and be reduced to inexpensive hamburger meat, leather, and animal feed.

Because each dairy cow is forced to produce far more calves than can be used on the dairy, her calves are immediately slaughtered, auctioned to veal operations, or auctioned to build beef herds and killed at one to two years of age. In all these cases, parts of their bodies will end up at the rendering plant, mixed with the offal and unusable body parts of fish, pigs, poultry, road kill, laboratory animals, and euthanized dogs, cats, horses, and other animals, and then cooked, ground up, and added to corn, wheat, soybeans, and other grains to be fed back to the cows. Cows have thus been routinely forced to eat other cows, and quite possibly the flesh and organs of their own young, in their “enriched” feed. The only reason this may now be stopping is the outbreak of mad cow disease, a direct result of such mad agricultural practices. Although the FDA’s ban on feeding the flesh of ruminants to ruminants has reduced the likelihood of cows eating other cows, they are still fed pigs, chickens, turkeys, fish, dogs, and other animals. Considering the reputedly lax enforcement and inspection of this FDA policy, some are likely still forced into cannibalism. Talking about civilization, huh? 

The whole dairy business is founded upon stealing: forcibly stealing calves from their mothers and mother’s milk from calves. We have become desensitized to just how cruel this actually is, and how it underlies, perhaps in large measure, our culture’s basic repression, confinement, and exploitation of the female and the feminine principle.

The mothers of all mammals feel terrible emotional stress if their newborn offspring are endangered and will do everything in their power to protect them. Human mothers know how deep this feeling is, and how devastating it would be to have their children taken from them. Mother love will often give its own life for its child. We can see this deep maternal caring in dogs, bears, elephants, monkeys, deer, lions, whales: in all mammals it is a defining and obvious characteristic of mothers. For scientists, agribusinessmen, or theologians to deny this, or discount its importance, only shows how reduced their intelligence and sensitivity have become through their cultural woundedness and consequent skill in disconnecting.

Of all the mammals, it is the cow whose maternal instinct has been perhaps the most obvious and celebrated: her gentle and patient eyes, her natural mothering way with her calf, licking and feeding and watching over her baby, and her loud lamenting when the calf is taken from her. She cannot fight the hands that steal her offspring away, or speak to us in human words, telling us how deeply it hurts her. But it is obvious to anyone with eyes to see and ears to hear. For us to ignore her suffering, and the suffering of her calf—hundreds, thousands, millions of times over—is to ignore and deny our own decency. There is a deep and terrible transgression in this, the unnatural coveting of the calf’s mother’s milk several thousand years ago, and the building of a whole culture around the stealing of milk, the killing of the mother and her children, and justifying the whole horrific thing by mythologizing it: the Lord promising us the land of milk and honey. This violent theft of milk from enslaved mothers planted seeds of war and exploitation that are tragically almost completely invisible. Today, our culture takes milk for granted! It is aggressively promoted around the world. How can we ever hope for peace when we practice such shameful violence on such a massive scale? So yeah, if you can not give up cheese and milk, try to give up animal cruelty instead. Be civilize, people!

Sources: Animal Rights (about.com), Non Human Slavery (nonhumanslavery.com), This Vegan Life (thisveganlife.org)

Dewi is an Operations Manager at Divine Earth - an Organic Vegan Cuisine in Seminyak, Bali - Indonesia.