• Blog written by Victoria Smith, volunteer blog writer

Have you ever really stopped to think about milk? 

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

Marketing Lies 

I for one grew up without questioning the marketing that surrounded me: dairy = calcium = healthy bones = I’d grow up strong and happy. From fun-flavoured milk and yoghurts to cheese packaged as strings and triangles - it was everywhere! All reinforced by playful and colourful advertising. 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 was welfare-washing and green-washing in full force. 

It's testament to the power of advertising. A female needs to be pregnant for her body to start producing the milk that feeds her baby, and this rule applies for all mammals, including cows. This realisation led to a spiral of harsh learnings that I wished my vegetarian-self had discovered many years earlier.

Broken by the Dairy Industry

The farming of our fellow animals is surely a feminist issue, as the dairy industry is 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. 

Once artificially inseminated, cows carry their babies for 9 months, just as human mothers do. Cows are strongly maternal animals, and would naturally spend around 10 months feeding and nurturing their babies. However, humans 'need cow’s milk.’ So on a dairy farm, a 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 is forcibly taken  from you. You will fight back hopelessly to try to stop this from happening, and call out for your baby afterwards, but it won’t make any difference. The calf’s gender determines their fate. Girls will be housed away from their mothers and when they’re around 18 months old, they enter the same production cycle. Baby boys will either be used as veal or beef. 

Milked to misery 

With her baby stolen away from her, 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. Selective breeding, over many generations, means that cows in dairy herds produce unnatural amounts of milk. Whilst their calf would feed five or six times a day, 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 and painful mastitis. 

Milk will be taken until the cow produces less and less, at which point she will be impregnated again and the cycle will start over. This will happen 3 or 4 times in her lifetime, until she no longer produces a sufficient quantity of milk for  the industry to consider her ‘profitable.’ Cows naturally live for around 25 years. Dairy cows live for about 5, before their exhausted bodies give up. At this point, they’ll be sold off for cheap meat.

It’s time for change! 

No female should endure this suffering, regardless of species. Cows feel love and pain just as we do. Enslaving them and exploiting their bodies to steal the milk meant for their calves is morally bankrupt. 

We don’t need dairy. 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 unnatural and there are so many plant-based milks that are healthy and sustainable. 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?

Please broaden your compassion to our fellow animals this International Women’s Day. And keep an eye on our socials on Saturday 8th March for an online action you can get involved in. 

As always,

For the animals!