Dairy is one of the biggest barriers for transformation change to a healthy vegan diet, especially (obviously) for vegetarians. First, consider that the largest health insurance company in the world, Kaiser Permanente, wants all of their doctors to recommend to all their patients a plant-based diet without meat or dairy.
Americans consume an average of 620 pounds of dairy per year. However, scientific evidence shows that dairy is unnecessary and causes significant acute and cause chronic disease. For example, the risk of prostate cancer is 70% increased for men who consume high
amounts of dairy. Only 2% of American men are aware of a link between
dairy and prostate cancer.
Dairy products account for 30% of dioxin exposure in adults and 50% in children. About 70% of dairy is contaminated with pesticides linked to infertility, birth defects, a weakened immune system and hormone disruptions. Cow’s milk is consistently contaminated with other dangerous chemicals including antibiotics, herbicides, other carcinogens, neurotoxins, and developmental and reproductive toxins. Cow's milk also contains nearly sixty different hormones and growth factors that may pose risks to our health. Milk is the primary route by which consumers are exposed to radioactive contaminates released by nuclear plants. Milk is also often contaminated with perchlorate (i.e., rocket fuel), which effects the hormone-producing ability of the thyroid gland
Milk
(and cheese, which is concentrated milk) is also strongly associated
with: diarrhea, iron-deficiency anemia, eczema, bloating, asthma, sudden
infant death syndrome (SIDS), growth retardation, arthritis, and
osteoporosis. (p.102)
See, e.g., Keon, Joseph, Whitewash: The Disturbing Truth About Cow's Milk and Your Health (2010).
Cancer
For cancer, animal protein increases the levels of a hormone IGF-1, which is a risk factor for cancer and the growth of tumors. Casein (87% of milk protein) allows more carcinogens into cells, which allow more dangerous carcinogen products to bind to DNA, which allow more mutagenic reactions that give rise to cancer cells. Casein is the most significant carcinogen we consume.
A plant-based diet significantly lowers the growth of the IGF-1 factor that is known to promote cancer cell development and it causes significant protection against DNA damage. The WFPB diet decreases up to 66% the toxic compounds associated with increased cancer risks within two weeks.
Exposed to a powerful carcinogen, all rats fed a diet of 20% animal protein developed cancer while none of the animals fed 5% animal protein did. 100% to 0%.
Some studies show that at least 80-90%, and probably closer to 97% of all cancers are related to diet and lifestyle.100 Other evidence shows that diet accounts for at least 30-35% of all cancers whereas 25-30% of cancer (and 87% of lung cancers) are primarily due to smoking, 15-20% are due to infections, 10-20% are triggered by obesity, and 4-6% are tied to alcohol ingestion, with the balance thought to be caused by factors such as radiation, stress, inadequate physical activity, and environmental contaminants.
See, e.g., Dr. Campbell, Whole: Rethinking the Science of Nutrition (2014), and The China Study: The Most Comprehensive Study of Nutrition Ever Conducted And the Startling Implications for Diet, Weight Loss, And Long-term Health (2006).
The Comprehensive Vegan Perspective on Dairy:
Ethics (2, 13): The egg and dairy industries are inextricably linked to the flesh-food industry because animals raised to produce eggs and milk are eventually slaughtered and eaten when they are no longer productive. The use of dairy and eggs are not justifiable for ethical vegetarians. Their intent is to eliminate the exploitation of animals and move closer to a truly humane society. The Vegan Society was founded in 1944 to encourage the active practice of ahimsa (dynamic harmlessness) as a part of a vegan lifestyle. Members embrace ahimsa as an urgent worldwide necessity and advocate six pillars—one for each letter of ahimsa:
Abstinance from animal products
Harmlessness with reverence for life
Integrity of thought, word, and deed
Mastery over onself
Service to humanity, nature, and creation
Advancement of understanding and truth.
It wasn't until 1987 that the vegan movement became mainstream. John Robbins provided the catapult with the release of his groundbreaking book, Diet for a New America (1998). This work included the first hard-hitting expose of the consequences of factory farming for food animals, the environment, and human health. (See Robins, Food Revolution (2010).
Global Warming: (21): Those who recognize intensive animal agriculture as a factor in global warming often blame cow flatulence for increasing methane levels, but livestock leave their mark in many other ways. People increase carbon dioxide emissions when they clear forests to make room for food animals and animal feed, run factory machinery, bring in feed, and transport animals. Fertilizers generate nitrous oxide, and manure releases more methane. The UN estimates that 1/5 of human generated emissions—9% of CO2, 37% of methane, and 65% of nitrous oxide—comes from livestock production, and mostly cows and the deforestation to feed the cows. World Bank and Worldwatch Institute analysts estimate livestock accounts for 51% of global emissions.
It may come as a surprise that the majority of household emissions are due to food production rather than food miles. When people think about greening their diet, most people often focus on sourcing food locally. However, local animals are typically fattened on transported fodder, trucked to slaughter, processed, and shipped to retail outlets. Food delivery only accounts for 4% of food-related emissions and wholesaling and retailing account for 5%. Average consumers could reduce their energy footprint more effectively by eating 100% vegan one day a week than by eating 100% local seven days a week.
Methane/nitrous-oxide emissions (25-100 and 300 times greater warming effects than carbon dioxide) are most strongly linked to the red meat and dairy industries. This is why the international climate scientific community recommends a vegan diet to help save the world from hunger, poverty, and the worst impacts of climate change. (Caris. The Guardian, UN urges global move to meat and dairy-free diet (June 2010)).
In addition, if land use were reappriased and plant foods were raised for direct consumption, the global face of malnutrition would be transformed. Currently, about 80% of the world's soybeans and over 50% of corn is fed to livestock. However, it takes about 15 pounds of feed to yield 1 pound of beef, 6 pounds for 1 pound of pork, and 5 pounds for 1 pound of chicken. The bottom line is that raising livestock consumes far more food than it yields.
Water: Dairy cows are also contributing to significant water consumption, shortages, water pollution, and infectious disease. Animal agriculture is the leading threats to water systems. It's estimated that agricultural production consumes 70% of global fresh water, with the majority going to cows. Plus, a farm with 2,500 diary cows produces the same amount of waste as a city of 411,000 people. The manure is stored in open-air pits or huge holding tanks, presenting a hazard. The manure contains pathogenic organisms, pharmaceuticals (hormones, antibiotics), chemical contaminants such as heavy metals and nitrates), and excessive nutrients such as phosphorus and nitrogen—all of which threaten water quality. Manure pits crack and leak out into the groundwater or overflow and pollute nearby surface water.
Nutrition: It's important to recognize that plants can provide all the necessary minerals—there's no need for animal products. Of particular interest, related to dairy, is calcium and iodine
Calcium (179, 183): Calcium is the most common mineral in the body. Before the advent of animal husbandry, humans in many parts of the world had dairy-free diets that were calcium-rich (averaging 2,000 mg per day or more). However, many of the plants they consumed aren't commonly eaten in modern times. Much of the produce in supermarkets has been bred for sweetness or ease of transport rather than for nutritional excellence. As a result, it's far lower in calcium than plant foods gathered by early humans.
Meanwhile, nutrition-education campaigns and diary advertisements (tens of billions of dollars worth per year) lead the public to believe that humans require cow's milk to meet their calcium needs. However, milk of other animals has not been a cornerstone of the human diet throughout history. This practice of dairying appears to be a recent phenomenon in specific areas of the world. Normally, 70% of the world's population (nearly 100% for some Asians, Native Americans and over 50% for South Americans, and Africans) shows diminished production of the enzyme lactase and lose the ability to digest lactose, the sugar in the milk. The lack of lactase results in the experience of abdominal pain, bloating, flatulence, and diarrhea when cow's milk is consumed.
Calcium gives hardness to bones and teeth. The body achieves peak bone mass by about age 28, has a few decades of minimal change, and then a period of loss, estimated at 1-2% per year. Maintaining calcium intakes also helps prevent hypertension, aids muscle relaxation, nerve cell transmissions, and for regulating cell metabolism. Calcium is vital for survival.
Recommended Intake of calcium is 1,000 mg per day for adults, 1,00mg for women over 50 and men over 70. However, Recommended Daily Intakes (RDI) written with a strangling influence by the animal and dairy industry. This RDI is biased, misleading, and encourages an excessive consumption of dairy. These amounts considerably exceed the intake in countries that consume no dairy and less calcium (400-600 mg/day) but experience much lower rates of osteoporosis. It's a myth that we need to consume lots of calcium to have strong bones and prevent osteoprosis. (Campbell, Whole (2014)).
Worldwide studies show that average vegan intakes of calcium range from about 500 to 940 mg daily, providing about 50 to 94% of RDIs. In many of these studies, fortified products were not available. The average calcium intake of nonvegetarians in the US is well below RDIs for every age and gender group. A plant-based diet does not increase the risk of osteoporosis.
Calcium is available in a wide assortment of vegetables, particularly the greens: broccoli, bok choy, kale, cabbage, watercress, and mustard and turnip greens. From these, the body absorbs 40-60% of the calcium present. Calcium is well absorbed (50%) from fortified juices, milks, and tofu.
Some people, vegans and nonvegans, would benefit from a few hundred mg of supplementary calcium to top up daily intakes. Multivitamins typically contain 200 to 400 mg of calcium, and is best absorbed with stomach acid, with a meal, and vitamin D (15 mcg; 20 minutes of sun a day).
Osteoporosis (65): The average person says that milk or dairy products is best for bones. People of every age assume it's risky to shun milk. As it turns out, consumers who eat the most calcium (also the most dairy products) aren't immune to osteoporosis. In fact, people who drink milk have higher, not lower rates of osteoporosis than populations with lower calcium intakes.
Calcium intake is not the most important determinant of calcium balance. 75% of calcium balance is determined by calcium excretion and 15% by calcium absorption. Sodium and salt increases calcium excretion. Caffeine reduces the absorption of calcium. Alcohol reduces calcium and vitamin D absorption.
Also, calcium decreases iron bioavailability by as much as 400%, while carotenoids increase iron absorption by as much as 300%. Theoretically, in comparing a high-calcium, low carotenoid diet with a low-calcium, high-carotenoid diet, we might see an 800-1,200% difference in iron absorption.
Meanwhile, nutrition-education campaigns and diary advertisements (tens of billions of dollars worth per year) lead the public to believe that humans require cow's milk to meet their calcium needs. However, milk of other animals has not been a cornerstone of the human diet throughout history. This practice of dairying appears to be a recent phenomenon in specific areas of the world. Normally, 70% of the world's population (nearly 100% for some Asians, Native Americans and over 50% for South Americans, and Africans) shows diminished production of the enzyme lactase and lose the ability to digest lactose, the sugar in the milk. The lack of lactase results in the experience of abdominal pain, bloating, flatulence, and diarrhea when cow's milk is consumed.
Calcium gives hardness to bones and teeth. The body achieves peak bone mass by about age 28, has a few decades of minimal change, and then a period of loss, estimated at 1-2% per year. Maintaining calcium intakes also helps prevent hypertension, aids muscle relaxation, nerve cell transmissions, and for regulating cell metabolism. Calcium is vital for survival.
Recommended Intake of calcium is 1,000 mg per day for adults, 1,00mg for women over 50 and men over 70. However, Recommended Daily Intakes (RDI) written with a strangling influence by the animal and dairy industry. This RDI is biased, misleading, and encourages an excessive consumption of dairy. These amounts considerably exceed the intake in countries that consume no dairy and less calcium (400-600 mg/day) but experience much lower rates of osteoporosis. It's a myth that we need to consume lots of calcium to have strong bones and prevent osteoprosis. (Campbell, Whole (2014)).
Worldwide studies show that average vegan intakes of calcium range from about 500 to 940 mg daily, providing about 50 to 94% of RDIs. In many of these studies, fortified products were not available. The average calcium intake of nonvegetarians in the US is well below RDIs for every age and gender group. A plant-based diet does not increase the risk of osteoporosis.
Calcium is available in a wide assortment of vegetables, particularly the greens: broccoli, bok choy, kale, cabbage, watercress, and mustard and turnip greens. From these, the body absorbs 40-60% of the calcium present. Calcium is well absorbed (50%) from fortified juices, milks, and tofu.
Some people, vegans and nonvegans, would benefit from a few hundred mg of supplementary calcium to top up daily intakes. Multivitamins typically contain 200 to 400 mg of calcium, and is best absorbed with stomach acid, with a meal, and vitamin D (15 mcg; 20 minutes of sun a day).
Osteoporosis (65): The average person says that milk or dairy products is best for bones. People of every age assume it's risky to shun milk. As it turns out, consumers who eat the most calcium (also the most dairy products) aren't immune to osteoporosis. In fact, people who drink milk have higher, not lower rates of osteoporosis than populations with lower calcium intakes.
Calcium intake is not the most important determinant of calcium balance. 75% of calcium balance is determined by calcium excretion and 15% by calcium absorption. Sodium and salt increases calcium excretion. Caffeine reduces the absorption of calcium. Alcohol reduces calcium and vitamin D absorption.
Also, calcium decreases iron bioavailability by as much as 400%, while carotenoids increase iron absorption by as much as 300%. Theoretically, in comparing a high-calcium, low carotenoid diet with a low-calcium, high-carotenoid diet, we might see an 800-1,200% difference in iron absorption.
Iodine (192): Iodine is required in miniscule amounts—but it's absolutely critical to life and health. Most of the world's iodine is found in the oceans. The soil content varies greatly from one region to another; as a result, some crops are rich in iodine while others contain little. Since 1924, salt manufacturers have fortified salt with iodine for the general popoulation to prevent deficiency. This was powerfully effective. Iodine is essential for thyroid hormones, which influence most of the organ systems in the body. It's essential for energy metabolism.
The adult RDI for iodine is 150 mcg per day. Excess can be toxic. The UL is set at 1,100 mcg. Vegan intakes are normal when using supplements containing iodine, iodized salt, or kelp. Without such sources, the vegan diet may be about 10% of recommended levels. However, these vegans do not show a deficiency symptoms after 5 years. The bottom line is that vegan diets may be insufficient unless they use iodized salt, sea vegetables or a supplement that contain iodine. Iodine deficinecy is particularly risky during pregnancy.
Dairy can be a significant source of iodine among nonvegans because of contamination of milk with iodine-containing cleaning solutions to remove mastitis-related pathogens from milking equipment and cows' teats.
Protein: Milk has 8g of protein per cup. Cheese has 5g per ounce.
In the minds of many, milk and animal products is associated with protein. In the US, 2/3 of protein intake is from animal sources and just 1/3 from plants. On the other hand, vegans take for granted that protein intake is automatically sufficient. All grains, legumes, nuts, seeds, and vegetables are protein sources. Vegans can easily meet their recommended protein intake regardless of gender, size, or activity level. Yet a vegan diet can be short of protein if it's centered on fruit (as in some raw vegan diets). Meta-studies on vegans show that vegans' protein is 10-14% of calories, well within the recommendations. Only raw diets are lower, closer to 8%. Unless someone chooses a "chips and soda" style of eating or a fruitarian diet, getting enough protein is easily accomplished with a vegan diet that provides sufficient calories. Beans, peas, lentils, and soy foods are high-protein ways to increase protein that also deliver iron, zinc, lysine, and plenty of other nutrients.
Arachidonic acid (117): Dairy and eggs contains some omega-6 fatty acids. It's important to have sufficient essential fatty acids (DHA, EPA). The ideal ratio of omega-6 to omega-3 fatty acids ranges from 2:1 to 10:1, with the ideal target of 2:1 to 4:1.
In vegan diets, the ratio of omega-6 to omega-3 ranges from 8:1 to 18:1. Most Americans in general get too much omega-6s compared to omega-3s. These intake levels can adversely impact growth and development, cell membrane function, inflammatory reactions, and numerous disease processes. Omega-6 sources include nuts, seeds, avocados and other high-fat plant foods and Omega-3 sources include flaxseed, chia seeds, and oil.
The Bottom Line: Vegans should take the necessary steps to achieve an omega-6 to omega-3 ratio that maximizes conversion of ALA to EPA and DHA. To reach the suggested ratio of 2:1 to 4:1, the goal is approximately 5 to 10% of calories from LA (Omega-6s) and 1.2-2.4% from ALA (Omega-3s). This would be 11-22g of LA and 2.7-5.3g of ALA.
In vegan diets, the ratio of omega-6 to omega-3 ranges from 8:1 to 18:1. Most Americans in general get too much omega-6s compared to omega-3s. These intake levels can adversely impact growth and development, cell membrane function, inflammatory reactions, and numerous disease processes. Omega-6 sources include nuts, seeds, avocados and other high-fat plant foods and Omega-3 sources include flaxseed, chia seeds, and oil.
The Bottom Line: Vegans should take the necessary steps to achieve an omega-6 to omega-3 ratio that maximizes conversion of ALA to EPA and DHA. To reach the suggested ratio of 2:1 to 4:1, the goal is approximately 5 to 10% of calories from LA (Omega-6s) and 1.2-2.4% from ALA (Omega-3s). This would be 11-22g of LA and 2.7-5.3g of ALA.
Best Omega 6s (LA): Walnuts (10.8/3.2 Tbl); pinenuts (9.4g); sunflower seeds (8.1g); Sesame seeds (6.2g); Pumpkin seeds (5.9g); Almonds (3.4g); peanuts (4.4g); plus oils: canola oil (2.7g per 1 Tbl) olive oil (1.3g); sesame oil (5.4g); plus avacado (3.4g).
Best Omega 3s (ALA): flaxseeds whole (4.7g); flaxseeds ground (3.2g); walnuts (2.6g); hempseeds (1.7g), canola oil (1.3g); plus oils: canola (1.3g per Tbl).
Compare: Organic whole milk (8oz) has 0.2:0.1 grams of omega-6:3s; Convention milk has 0.4:0.05g; Salmon (8oz) has 1:6.8g of omega-6:3s.Seeds, seed oils, and soybeans are principal sources of both omega-6s and omega-3s. Both walnuts and hempseeds provide a good balance. The most common sources of EPA and DHA are algaes and seaweeds (spirulina, kepl, wakame).
(Is Fish a healthy source of EPA and DHA? There's no question that fish eaters have a much higher intake than vegans. Vegans normally consume almost no EPA or DHA unless they eat fortified foods or use supplements. However, evidence shows that a diet with fish does not yield an advantage. Adding EPA and DHA to vegan diets may provide cardiovascular benefits, with lower heart disease rates. Meta-analysis comparing vegans and all dietary groups, including fish eaters, vegans have the lowest body fat, blood pressure, and blood cholesterol levels of all dietary groups. Vegans have a 32% lower risk of heart disease than fish eaters and meat-eaters (when adjusting for all confounding variables except BMI, and 28% lower risk when BMI is factored in). Unlike fish, algae sources are free of heavy metals (lead, mercury, and cadmium) and industrial pollutants (DDT, PCBs, dioxins). Considering the increasing demands for EPA and DHA and the rapid decline in fish species and stocks, consuming alternative sources of omega-3 fatty acids makes good sense.)
Cholesterol (135): Dairy is rich in the type of saturated fats most strongly linked to increased blood cholesterol levels and insulin resistance. The presence of cholesterol in dairy exaggerates the impact of the fat. Dairy also increases the risk of colorectal cancer.
Diabetes (58): 0.5-2.9% of vegans and 2.1-7.6% of nonvegetarians. are diagnosed with diabetes. The dietary factors most clarly associated with increased risk come almost exclusively from animal products and processed foods, including high-fat dairy products.
Rheumatoid Arthritis (80): Dairy is a trigger for arthritis and vegan diets are advantages and contain significant benefits.
Food Contaminants of Concern: (270-271)
Dairy (and meat and fish) is a major food source for:
- DDT, increasing the risk of nervous system damage, endocrine disruption, DNA damage, cancer, low birth weight, premature birth, and diabetes.
- Phthlates, increasing the risk of endocrine disruption, cancer, and reproductive abnormalities.
- Dioxin, increasing the risk of cancer, endocrine diruption, skin problems, immune suppression, and reproductive abnormalities.
- Hormones, increasing risk of endocrine disruption, some may increase risk of breast, prostate, and colon cancer.
- Antibiotics, increasing the risk of antibiotic resistance, allergies, endocrine disruption, and DNA toxicity.
- Polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs, increasing risk for nervous system damage, cancer, endocrine disruption, immune suppression, hearing loss, and liver, skin, and vision damage.
Eating Disorders (398): People experience pressure to add dairy products to their diets. However, such additions are not essential. Vegans have a balanced and nutritionally adequate diet.
Vegan Replacements (384): Nondairy foods can significantly increase energy intakes. Vegan replacements for most dairy products—including milk, cream, sour cream, ice cream, hard cheese, cream cheese, yogurt, and butter—are widely available. Some are soy-based, while others are made from almonds, rice, coconut, hemp-seeds, grains, or root vegetables. These products continue to evolve and are often both tasty and nutritious. Avoid dairy substitutes based on partially hydrogenated oils, sugar, and preservatives.
Source: Davis & Melina, Becoming Vegan: Comprehensive Edition, 279-81 (2014). See also, Becoming Vegan, Express Edition: The Everyday Guide to Plant-based Nutrition (2013).
Dieticians Brenda Davis and Vesanto Melina’s comprehensive analysis of the peer-reviewed medical science related to cancer and nutrition in Becoming Vegan (2014), includes about 75 citations to peer-reviewed medical literature (primary sources) showing that animal foods are a substantial factor in causing cancer and that WFPB nutrition helps prevent and reverse cancer.
The World Peace Diet
The Domination of the Feminine
Milk was destined to feed the animal's offspring and man should not take it with force for himself. The kid has the right to enjoy its mother's milk and its mother's love, but hard-hearted man, influenced by his materialistic and shallow outlook, changes and perverts these true functions. Thus the gentle kid is unable to partake of its mother's love and rejoice in the splendor of life. ~Rabbi Abraham Kook.
The Dairy Nightmare
There are two large categories of animal products that we eat even though they are not food for humans: dairy products and eggs. In some ways dairy and milk is more toxic and cruel than the flesh of animals, because the cows and chickens are severely abused for longer periods and inevitably slaughtered when their productivity declines.
The enslavement of the female dairy cow has contributed to the enslavement of humans in a range of ways. Though many of us stop eating dairy products just for health reasons, it's important to see the larger context of the ongoing tragedy, for this truth is as old as time: we cannot sow seeds of slavery and cruelty and reap the fruit of freedom and health.
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 youth of other species, and we are the only species that insists on drinking milk beyond the time of weaning. Perhaps we can not bear the thought of growing up and leaving home; perhaps we long for the peaceful oblivion of infancy -- even if we have to kill a mother cow's babies to get it.
It is only through an ongoing tradition of vicious domination that humans can drink cows' milk , an unhealthy and perverse action at its core. The dairy products in our grocery stores are the result of many centuries of human manipulation and horrific brutality against cows.
Pushing Cows to Produce
Cows today are forced to produce a far greater quantity of milk than they ever would in the wild. This is accomplished through two types of manipulation -- of food and of hormones. 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 7 months, beginning at less than 10 pounds per day, climaxing at about 25 pounds per day, and then then tapering 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 7-8 months. Dairy cows are impregnated at a much younger age than would occur int he wild, and are kept pregnant virtually continuously, even while they are lactating from the previous pregnancy. This quickly destroys their health. Though they would naturally live 25 years in the wild, after about 4 years of this abuse, their "productivity" drops off and they are then forced to endure the brutality of the slaughterhouse and be reduced to inexpensive hamburger meat, leather, and animal feed.
The milk is extremely unhealthy for humans. Besides the naturally occurring human toxins in cow's milk, like IGF-1 growth factor, casein, estrogen, soporific hormones, lactase, pus, bacteria, parasites, and the addictive casomorphines, there are toxins that are a direct result of pushing the cows so hard: artificially introduced growth hormones, milk-increasing hormones, antibiotics, tranquilizers, and feeds high in pesticide residues. So-called organic milk may contain smaller quantities of the artificial toxins, but not of the natural ones.
The cows produce such gigantic volumes of milk because they are forced to eat cholesterol in their feed, injected with a blend of hormones (which are minimally regulated). (e.g., rBGH, Monsanto's GE growth hormone was approved by the FDA in 1985 while all European governments banned it because of scientific evidence it increases cancer risks in both consumers and cows. Agribusiness interests trump consumer, environmental, or animal interests in the FDA.)
Of course, an adult cow in the wild is a complete herbivore, but in modern industrialized agriculture, they are given feed "enriched" with animal flesh and offal, by-products of the slaughter of fish, birds, and other mammals, including other cows.
Because each dairy cow is forced to produce far more calves than can be used on the dairy, her calves are immediately slaughtered, sold to veal operators, or used for beef herds and killed at one to two years of age. Parts of their bodies will end up mixed with the unusable body parts of other animals, road kill, laboratory animals, euthanized dogs, cats, and other animals, then cooked, ground-up, and added to corn, wheat, soybeans and fed back to the cows. Cows have thus been routinely forced to eat other cows. The only reason this may now be stopping is the outbreak of mad cow disease, a direct result of such mad agricultural practices.
This bizarre and outrageous cruelty is considered business as usual and no one has questioned it because the animals involved have been reduced to mere objects, with the sole overriding goal of producing the most milk at the lowest price. And with the USDA guaranteeing to buy milk surpluses, the industry maximizes production. This whole industry is obviously both a result of and a contributor to a severely reduced cultural intelligence that has lost its ability to make basic connections.
The Toxins in Milk
Ingested chemicals, pesticides, fungicides, fertilizers, and heavy metals accumulate in body tissues, especially in the fatty tissues and organs. Dairy cows thus concentrate not only the toxins that are sprayed on the grains and hay they eat, but also the more concentrated toxins that have accumulated in the rendered body parts of the animals they are forced to eat as well. All this accumulates in their milk, because milk is high in fat and toxins ride in fat.
Cows milk is specifically suited to the nutritional needs of herd animals who double their weight in only 47 das, weigh 300 pounds within 14 weeks, and grow 4 healthy stomachs. Cows milk contains 3 times as much protein as human milk and about 50% more fat.
Cows milk is far too coarse, especially for young children who are growing delicate brain, nervous system, and other tissues: the main human milk protein has a molecular weight of 14K; the basic protein in cow's milk is 233K, and because its so durable and sticky, is used as a binder in paint and glue that holds plywood together and sticks labels to bottles. It is perfect for building a calf's tissues but causes incalculable harm to humans. Human children have difficult breaking it down, creating a lot of acidic residue when metabolized, and causing many serious problems. There are a host of childhood symptoms linked with dairy products, including colic, earaches, sore throats, colds, fevers, anemia, diabetes, tonsillitis, appendicitis, allergies, inflammation, diarrhea, gas, and cramps. There are also affects on the early psychological development of children, and with the hormones, toxins, and misery in milk, one of the effects may very well be a basic desensitization of the child. How tragic to pollute and damage the miraculously sensitive human vehicle at an early age, reducing its ability to be a conduit for spiritual energy, wisdom, and compassion, and perhaps diminishing its ability to sense the subtle interconnectedness that it is created to perceive, explore, and celebrate.
At a deeper level, forcing young children to eat dairy products bring into their impressionable minds and bodies a most unfortunate and terrible vibrational energy of the profound sadness, grief, panic, suffering, and fear that mother cows always experience on dairies, organic or not 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 wither 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 , and bringing the building of a whole culture around the stealing of milk, the killing of the mother and her children, and the 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?
Four Pathways to Hell
The dairy cows are aware that the hands that confine and rape her and push her so hard for her milk cannot mean well for her children. The dairy-born calf will go down one of four doomed pathways. If she is a female, she may be raised to be, like her mother, a slave in the dairy. She will be removed from the mother so as not to waste the mother's marketable milk. She will be dehorned, usually by the use of a red-hot electric iron applied to her horn buttons for 5-20 seconds until it rubbs against the bone of the skull. According to the industry, about half of the calves are born with "too many" teats, and these extra teats may interfere with the electric milking machines. The teats are also removed from the calves with no anesthetic even though their nerves are well developed. You pull the teat outwards and take a bit with the scissors. Dehorning, tail docking, and teat removal not only cause intense pain but also increase the risk of infection and the spread of disease. It helps to account for the widespread problem of Bovine Leukemia Virus, which infects cows in an estimated 89% of U.S. dairies and may pose a cancer threat to consumers.
Whereas a wild heifer would not have her first calf for at least 3-5 years, the industry wants to get her pregnant as soon as possible. This is accomplished through hormone manipulation. The dairy cow will be confined to a stall or milking paddoc year-round, often exposed to extreme temperatures, with nothing to do but eat and stand in one place, reduced to the status of a milk-producing machine. She will be inseminated by a sperm gun shoved elbow-deep into her vagina and fired. The sperm comes from a special bull who also exists to be milked -- for her sperm.
No longer something done by her, milking is something inflicted upon her. The machines often cause cuts and injuries and can lead to mastitis, infection of the udder, which is rampant in modern dairies. Sometimes the milking machines give electrical shocks as well, causing considerable discomfort and fear. The cows are often also be "drenched" after giving birth to reduce metabolic diseases in early lactation: many gallons of nutrient-dense solution are forced into her through a seven-foot tube shoved down her throat. A similar procedure called lavage is often imposed on her newborn calf as well.
All this causes enormous suffering for the mother cows, and their health breaks down quickly. The unnatural milking causes the cows' udders to become painful and so heavy they sometimes drag on the ground and in their own feces, increasing the painful mastitis and leading to an overuse of antibiotics. their ankles are swollen and sore from standing constantly on concrete.
After 3-5 years, these dairy slaves are worn out and sent off in overcrowded tucks to face the final insulting brutality of the slaughterhouse. The majority of "downed" cattle arriving at slaughterhouses are dairy cows. They are too weak, diseased, or injured to walk off the truck. Their bones may break easily. Transport may last for several days with no food or water through bitter cold or extreme heat. Some cows literally freeze to the inner sides to the trucks. If they collapse, they are shocked with excruciatingly painful prods. If they still can't move, they are literally dragged by chains, often tearing skin, ripping tendons and ligaments, and breaking bones in the process. The same scenarios apply to dairies that produce so-called organic milk products, except that the feed is organic and there may be a little more space in the prison stall.
The second possible path: they may be killed shortly after birth if the veal industry and beef industry demand is low. The rennet in their young stomachs is valuable for making cheeses. Their bodies are then ground up for animal feed, and their skin is used for more expensive leather.
The third possible path -- a very dark and miserable path -- for dairy-born calves is to be auctioned to the veal industry. Both males and females. The abuse these poor creatures must endure for their short lives is well known and documented. they are forced into veal crates and chained at the neck as soon as they arrive, only days or weeks old. The crates confine the calves so they cannot move, causing undeveloped, more tender "meat." They are kept in the darkness and fed a diet purposefully deficient in iron. Their naturally joyful and frolicsome temperaments are destroyed by the pain and hopelessness of their situation. After 3-4 months, they are trucked to the slaugtherhouse to be killed for the veal and calfskin markets.
The fourth path, if they are male, is to be auctioned to the meat industry and raised for beef. In this case they will face the intense pain of unanesthetized castration when they are still young. They may also be branded, often several times with third degree burns, and dehorned, which is also highly painful. They spend 1-1.5 years confined or grazing and then are sent to the feedlot to be fattened. On feedlots, for a few months in fetid confinement...
All four of the possible paths that a calf born on a dairy may take are paths of abuse and early death. Since bovines in the wild usualy live 20-30 years, the industry, in killing calves, steers, and dairy cows at the ages of several months to several years, is really killing infants and children. This is the same as the industries that confine and kill lambs, pigs, chickens, turkeys, and fish: all are pushed to grow abnormally quickly and slaughtered young. The animal food culture promotes domination and exploitation of the female and the feminine, which are full of life-giving and nurturing powers, and of infants and children, who are full of the powers of innocence and growth.
The Mustache Mask that hides the most sickening and inhumane industry practically imaginable. These docile vegetarian mothers and their unfortunate children are dominated from birth to death so humans can fatten themselves on dairy products and cow flesh. And the deeper justice is inescapable: by killing them, we kill ourselves; by enslaving them, we enslave ourselves; by sickening them, we sicken ourselves.
Instigating the rape, exploitation and death of other female animals, women may be viewed simultaneously by men as meat, mere objects to be used. Ironically, just as cows are forced to have unnaturally large and swollen mammary glands to overproduce milk for the dairy industry, the resulting foods produce unnaturally large mammary glands in the women who consume them -- a feature that is prized in our herding culture that further reinforces women's status as mere objects for the eyes of men. The interconnected dairy and meat industries perpetuate the patriarchal herding mentality that sees both animals and women as "meat," to be milked and eaten in one case and used sexually in the other.
Eggs: More Domination of the Feminine:
As with dairy products, when we buy eggs we instigate theft and violence against horribly abused females and contribute to environmental contamination, social pathology, and disease. In egg agribusiness, the same principles apply, and are taken to even further extremes. Sentient females are categorized and reduced to mere monetary units of production, imprisoned in unimaginably crowded, stressful, and filthy conditions, their eggs stolen -- and then, when they are no longer capable of producing at a high enough level, they are brutally killed.
Chicken eggs are toxic for humans...
Like all the animals whose bodies are used to produce food for our dining tables, chickens are seen as mere commodities. Individual chickens in egg-laying operations are so cheap to replace that they are virtually worthless and are treated as such. They spend their lives in battery cages, small wire prisons 14-16 inches high and 18-20 inches across, each containing 4-8 hens packed in so tightly that they can never spread their wings.... The wires chafe away most of their feathers, their heads, wings, or legs get stuck between the wires and thus starve to death, their rotting corpses are endured by other hens int he cage, their feet are painfully cut by the wires, the feces and urine from the 3-4 rows of cages above fall on their heads and bodies.... There are huge number of diseases inherent in the battery system... All family and social and natural life is destroyed...
As with the dairy industry, the egg industry is founded upon the total domination of the feminine, and upon the manipulation of female bodies to maximize profits with no regard to the outrageous cruelty involved. Female chicks are routinely debeaked, an exceedingly traumatic operation in which about half of the beak is chopped off. Many die on the spot. For those who survive, the chronic pain from this procedure may last their whole lives and interfere with eating. Male chicks are unneeded, so workers mass-annihilate them, either by live suffocation and crushing in large plastic trash bags or by dumping them into machines with rotating blades like wood chippers that turn them into instant chicken feed or fertilizer. Hens who no longer produce enough eggs also are disposed of in the wood chipping machines.
On modern chicken operations, the one goal is to cut costs and maximize the number of eggs that drop from the hen's uteruses. Over 250 eggs per year, more than 2.5 times the number hens would lay under more natural conditions. At the end of its laying cycle, if they aren't killed, they are often force-molted to shock their bodies into another cycle of egg laying. This is done by withholding food and water and administering a combination of drugs and hormones. The forced starvation may last up to 2 weeks, killing many of the birds in the process. ...We can perhaps be born into no worse hell in this universe than being a female chicken on an industrial egg farm in the United States.
In the so-called free-range egg operations, hens are typically debeaked, they are still treated as objects, males are all brutally killed at birth, and the term free-rang has little legal meaning.
The Web of Connections
Female cows and chickens are ruthlessly dominated to provide products that are vital and healthy for their offspring, community, and species but cause disease, pollution, hunger, and suffering when consumed by humans. When we steal their milk and eggs and kill their children, we set up the conditions for the same to happen to us. If we allow corporations to steal, use and kill cow and chicken babies, it will happen to our babies also. In fact, it is already happening.
The negative effects of consuming dairy products and eggs on individual health are linked to negative consequences for our world ecosystems and our culture. Everything is connected: the consumption of dairy products and eggs is linked with: allergies, skin disorders, cancer, heart disease, strokes, diabetes, aand a laundry list of other ailments; the arsenal of products and procedures marketed by the medical industry to combat these unnecessary ailments; the enormous profits accumulated by the agribusiness, chemical, pharmaceutical, and banking industries; the social inequality and injustice that this promotes, giving rise to elitism and further conflict; the poisoning of rivers, killing of fish; the lives lost in wars caused by spiraling demand for petroleum and by desperation, as water rights to go rich agribusiness dairy and chicken operations funded by US banks in Third World countries, while poor people face chronic thirst and contaminated water.
The web of connects is fast and includes all beings. We are feeding on other's fear and despair, on the violence that a patriarchal mentality systematically enforces on them. If we look deeply, we'll see that this mentality breeds violence in our lives as well. Should we, who long for mercy, freedom, and joy, and for a more enlightened society that supports peace and respect for our earth and the sacredness of all life, be the agents of such violence? When we make connects between our culturally induced desire to eat dairy and egg products and the cruelty to vulnerable mothers that this will necessarily entail, our intelligence and compassion are nourished, and we naturally being to make new choices. There are plenty of substitutes for animal-derived milk products and eggs.
Reviving Sophia
Dominating others requires us to disconnect from them, and from aspects of ourselves as well. In exploiting diary cows and hens, we specifically exploit their uteruses and mammary glands. This inhumane desecration of the most intimate and life-giving functions of the feminine principle, that of giving birth to new life and of tenderly nourishing that life, harms us perhaps as deeply as it does the cows, though our wounds may be less obvious.
Many spiritual teachers have pointed out that when we harm others, we harm ourselves even more severely. The hard-heartedness of the killer and exploiter is in itself a terrible punishment because it is a loss of sensitivity to the beauty and sacredness of life. That loss may go unrecognized, but the life itself, violent and competitive, is lived as struggle of separateness and underlying fear and its relations with others are poisoned.
By enslaving and cruelly exploiting mothers and babies, we attack and injure the sacred feminine within ourselves as well as in nature. This is an attack on our essential being, on our sense of nurturing life and protecting the vulnerable. These are truly terrible seeds to be sowing, for the feminine principle within us all is the seat of loving-kindness, receptivity, caring, and the urge to nurture and protect. In attacking our own inner feminine principle, we become as a culture harder and more separate, competitive, aggressive, and self-centered. Ironically, we become commodities ourselves, controlled and enslaved by a system of our own making, yet we don't realize it because we've been taught to disconnect. We block out the cries of mothers on dairies. We block out the cries of human mothers whose babies are taken from them -- thousands every day -- by easily preventable starvation. We block out the cries of mothers whose babies are killed by bombs and bullets fired by boys serving the military death machine.
Liberating and honoring the feminine principle is perhaps the most pressing task in our culture's evolution toward peace, sustainability, and spiritual maturity. The feminine, cross-culturally, is concerned fundamentally with nurturing, receptivity, making connections, intuition, and bringing forth new life. In our herding culture, these qualities are not respected, work requires men to become hard and cruel, and our separateness from and superiority to animals, nature and the life-giving processes of the feminine is emphasized. This has led to a patriarchal mentality concerned fundamentally with domination, control, separation, rational analysis, commodification, war, and killing. It's basic dictum is that might makes right. And yet the feminine principle is still alive, longed for, and beloved, because we know at the deepest levels that this is a vital aspect of our essential nature.
The herding culture has spread and conquered less aggressive culture and enforces its mentality of domination and its core practice of commodifying and eating animals. The usurper continues today, attacking nature, women, animals, and the vulnerable as it strives to consolidate control in a few elite hands. It derives power from the public's regular daily meals of hidden violence. Consuming and killing have become defining activities, fed by the disconnectedness and repressed guilt that accompany our suppression of the feminine principle. Beings are forced into the role of mere objects. The way hunters look at animals, the way corporations look at nature, and the way men are typically taught to look at women, and how women typically learn to be looked at by men, are all part of this process.
Enormous suffering is inevitable in all this, polluting relationships and eroding the spiritual sensitivity that sees beyond materialistic, I-it dualisms to the sacred subjects that are always present in living beings. As individuals and as a culture, our ability to heal, transform, and evolve beyond this old defiling mentality is tied to our food choices more than anything else. To meditate meditate for world peace, to pray for a better world, and to work for social justice and environmental protection while continuing to purchase the flesh, milk, and eggs of horribly abused animals exposes a disconnect that is so fundamental that it renders our efforts absurd, hypocritical, and doomed to certain failure.
We are hearing a call from our inner wisdom to reawaken respect for the feminine principle. Can we ever be successful in answering this call while still imprisoning, raping, abusing, and killing millions of mothers just for our pleasure, continuing our subservience to social pressure and indoctrination? The inner feminine is our intuition, our sensitivity, and our ability to sense the profound interconnectedness of events and beings, and it is vial to peace, wisdom, joy, intelligence, creativity, and spiritual awakening.
With every baby calf stolen from her mother and killed, with every gallon of milk stolen from enslaved and broken mothers, with every thrust of the raping sperm gun, with every egg stolen from a helpless, frantic hen, and will every baby chick killed or locked for life in a hellish nightmare cage, we kill the sacred feminine within ourselves. By ordering and eating products from the industrial herding complex that dominates the feminine with an iron fist, we squelch our opportunities for maturing to higher levels of understanding, sensitivity, and compassion. We remain merely ironic in our quests.
Our welfare is ultimately dependent on the welfare of others. By freeing and encouraging others we are liberated and encouraged. We can never sever our connection to all beings, but we can ignore and violate it, planting seeds of tragedy and suffering. Honoring our natural place in the web of life by eating the foods intended for us will plant seeds of abundance, love, and freedom, whatever our religion may be.
Achieving peace among other human beings, from the household to the international battlefields, depends upon treating each other with respect and kindness. This will be possible when we first extend that respect and kindness to those who are at our mercy and who cannot retaliate against us. If we are sincere in our quest for human peace, freedom, and dignity, we have no choice but to offer this to our neighbors, the animals of this earth. Cultivating awareness, we can transcend the imposed view that animals are mere food objects. With this, we will see consumerism, pornography, and the disconnectedness that leads inexorably to slavery and self-destructing evaporate. As the mentality of domination and exclusivism fades, we will be able to heal divisions of gender, race, and class
Source: The World Peace Diet. Eating for Spiritual and Social Harmony, Will Tuttle (2005)
There are two large categories of animal products that we eat even though they are not food for humans: dairy products and eggs. In some ways dairy and milk is more toxic and cruel than the flesh of animals, because the cows and chickens are severely abused for longer periods and inevitably slaughtered when their productivity declines.
The enslavement of the female dairy cow has contributed to the enslavement of humans in a range of ways. Though many of us stop eating dairy products just for health reasons, it's important to see the larger context of the ongoing tragedy, for this truth is as old as time: we cannot sow seeds of slavery and cruelty and reap the fruit of freedom and health.
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 youth of other species, and we are the only species that insists on drinking milk beyond the time of weaning. Perhaps we can not bear the thought of growing up and leaving home; perhaps we long for the peaceful oblivion of infancy -- even if we have to kill a mother cow's babies to get it.
It is only through an ongoing tradition of vicious domination that humans can drink cows' milk , an unhealthy and perverse action at its core. The dairy products in our grocery stores are the result of many centuries of human manipulation and horrific brutality against cows.
Pushing Cows to Produce
Cows today are forced to produce a far greater quantity of milk than they ever would in the wild. This is accomplished through two types of manipulation -- of food and of hormones. 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 7 months, beginning at less than 10 pounds per day, climaxing at about 25 pounds per day, and then then tapering 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 7-8 months. Dairy cows are impregnated at a much younger age than would occur int he wild, and are kept pregnant virtually continuously, even while they are lactating from the previous pregnancy. This quickly destroys their health. Though they would naturally live 25 years in the wild, after about 4 years of this abuse, their "productivity" drops off and they are then forced to endure the brutality of the slaughterhouse and be reduced to inexpensive hamburger meat, leather, and animal feed.
The milk is extremely unhealthy for humans. Besides the naturally occurring human toxins in cow's milk, like IGF-1 growth factor, casein, estrogen, soporific hormones, lactase, pus, bacteria, parasites, and the addictive casomorphines, there are toxins that are a direct result of pushing the cows so hard: artificially introduced growth hormones, milk-increasing hormones, antibiotics, tranquilizers, and feeds high in pesticide residues. So-called organic milk may contain smaller quantities of the artificial toxins, but not of the natural ones.
The cows produce such gigantic volumes of milk because they are forced to eat cholesterol in their feed, injected with a blend of hormones (which are minimally regulated). (e.g., rBGH, Monsanto's GE growth hormone was approved by the FDA in 1985 while all European governments banned it because of scientific evidence it increases cancer risks in both consumers and cows. Agribusiness interests trump consumer, environmental, or animal interests in the FDA.)
Of course, an adult cow in the wild is a complete herbivore, but in modern industrialized agriculture, they are given feed "enriched" with animal flesh and offal, by-products of the slaughter of fish, birds, and other mammals, including other cows.
Because each dairy cow is forced to produce far more calves than can be used on the dairy, her calves are immediately slaughtered, sold to veal operators, or used for beef herds and killed at one to two years of age. Parts of their bodies will end up mixed with the unusable body parts of other animals, road kill, laboratory animals, euthanized dogs, cats, and other animals, then cooked, ground-up, and added to corn, wheat, soybeans and fed back to the cows. Cows have thus been routinely forced to eat other cows. The only reason this may now be stopping is the outbreak of mad cow disease, a direct result of such mad agricultural practices.
This bizarre and outrageous cruelty is considered business as usual and no one has questioned it because the animals involved have been reduced to mere objects, with the sole overriding goal of producing the most milk at the lowest price. And with the USDA guaranteeing to buy milk surpluses, the industry maximizes production. This whole industry is obviously both a result of and a contributor to a severely reduced cultural intelligence that has lost its ability to make basic connections.
The Toxins in Milk
Ingested chemicals, pesticides, fungicides, fertilizers, and heavy metals accumulate in body tissues, especially in the fatty tissues and organs. Dairy cows thus concentrate not only the toxins that are sprayed on the grains and hay they eat, but also the more concentrated toxins that have accumulated in the rendered body parts of the animals they are forced to eat as well. All this accumulates in their milk, because milk is high in fat and toxins ride in fat.
Cows milk is specifically suited to the nutritional needs of herd animals who double their weight in only 47 das, weigh 300 pounds within 14 weeks, and grow 4 healthy stomachs. Cows milk contains 3 times as much protein as human milk and about 50% more fat.
Cows milk is far too coarse, especially for young children who are growing delicate brain, nervous system, and other tissues: the main human milk protein has a molecular weight of 14K; the basic protein in cow's milk is 233K, and because its so durable and sticky, is used as a binder in paint and glue that holds plywood together and sticks labels to bottles. It is perfect for building a calf's tissues but causes incalculable harm to humans. Human children have difficult breaking it down, creating a lot of acidic residue when metabolized, and causing many serious problems. There are a host of childhood symptoms linked with dairy products, including colic, earaches, sore throats, colds, fevers, anemia, diabetes, tonsillitis, appendicitis, allergies, inflammation, diarrhea, gas, and cramps. There are also affects on the early psychological development of children, and with the hormones, toxins, and misery in milk, one of the effects may very well be a basic desensitization of the child. How tragic to pollute and damage the miraculously sensitive human vehicle at an early age, reducing its ability to be a conduit for spiritual energy, wisdom, and compassion, and perhaps diminishing its ability to sense the subtle interconnectedness that it is created to perceive, explore, and celebrate.
At a deeper level, forcing young children to eat dairy products bring into their impressionable minds and bodies a most unfortunate and terrible vibrational energy of the profound sadness, grief, panic, suffering, and fear that mother cows always experience on dairies, organic or not 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 wither 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 , and bringing the building of a whole culture around the stealing of milk, the killing of the mother and her children, and the 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?
Four Pathways to Hell
The dairy cows are aware that the hands that confine and rape her and push her so hard for her milk cannot mean well for her children. The dairy-born calf will go down one of four doomed pathways. If she is a female, she may be raised to be, like her mother, a slave in the dairy. She will be removed from the mother so as not to waste the mother's marketable milk. She will be dehorned, usually by the use of a red-hot electric iron applied to her horn buttons for 5-20 seconds until it rubbs against the bone of the skull. According to the industry, about half of the calves are born with "too many" teats, and these extra teats may interfere with the electric milking machines. The teats are also removed from the calves with no anesthetic even though their nerves are well developed. You pull the teat outwards and take a bit with the scissors. Dehorning, tail docking, and teat removal not only cause intense pain but also increase the risk of infection and the spread of disease. It helps to account for the widespread problem of Bovine Leukemia Virus, which infects cows in an estimated 89% of U.S. dairies and may pose a cancer threat to consumers.
Whereas a wild heifer would not have her first calf for at least 3-5 years, the industry wants to get her pregnant as soon as possible. This is accomplished through hormone manipulation. The dairy cow will be confined to a stall or milking paddoc year-round, often exposed to extreme temperatures, with nothing to do but eat and stand in one place, reduced to the status of a milk-producing machine. She will be inseminated by a sperm gun shoved elbow-deep into her vagina and fired. The sperm comes from a special bull who also exists to be milked -- for her sperm.
No longer something done by her, milking is something inflicted upon her. The machines often cause cuts and injuries and can lead to mastitis, infection of the udder, which is rampant in modern dairies. Sometimes the milking machines give electrical shocks as well, causing considerable discomfort and fear. The cows are often also be "drenched" after giving birth to reduce metabolic diseases in early lactation: many gallons of nutrient-dense solution are forced into her through a seven-foot tube shoved down her throat. A similar procedure called lavage is often imposed on her newborn calf as well.
All this causes enormous suffering for the mother cows, and their health breaks down quickly. The unnatural milking causes the cows' udders to become painful and so heavy they sometimes drag on the ground and in their own feces, increasing the painful mastitis and leading to an overuse of antibiotics. their ankles are swollen and sore from standing constantly on concrete.
After 3-5 years, these dairy slaves are worn out and sent off in overcrowded tucks to face the final insulting brutality of the slaughterhouse. The majority of "downed" cattle arriving at slaughterhouses are dairy cows. They are too weak, diseased, or injured to walk off the truck. Their bones may break easily. Transport may last for several days with no food or water through bitter cold or extreme heat. Some cows literally freeze to the inner sides to the trucks. If they collapse, they are shocked with excruciatingly painful prods. If they still can't move, they are literally dragged by chains, often tearing skin, ripping tendons and ligaments, and breaking bones in the process. The same scenarios apply to dairies that produce so-called organic milk products, except that the feed is organic and there may be a little more space in the prison stall.
The second possible path: they may be killed shortly after birth if the veal industry and beef industry demand is low. The rennet in their young stomachs is valuable for making cheeses. Their bodies are then ground up for animal feed, and their skin is used for more expensive leather.
The third possible path -- a very dark and miserable path -- for dairy-born calves is to be auctioned to the veal industry. Both males and females. The abuse these poor creatures must endure for their short lives is well known and documented. they are forced into veal crates and chained at the neck as soon as they arrive, only days or weeks old. The crates confine the calves so they cannot move, causing undeveloped, more tender "meat." They are kept in the darkness and fed a diet purposefully deficient in iron. Their naturally joyful and frolicsome temperaments are destroyed by the pain and hopelessness of their situation. After 3-4 months, they are trucked to the slaugtherhouse to be killed for the veal and calfskin markets.
The fourth path, if they are male, is to be auctioned to the meat industry and raised for beef. In this case they will face the intense pain of unanesthetized castration when they are still young. They may also be branded, often several times with third degree burns, and dehorned, which is also highly painful. They spend 1-1.5 years confined or grazing and then are sent to the feedlot to be fattened. On feedlots, for a few months in fetid confinement...
All four of the possible paths that a calf born on a dairy may take are paths of abuse and early death. Since bovines in the wild usualy live 20-30 years, the industry, in killing calves, steers, and dairy cows at the ages of several months to several years, is really killing infants and children. This is the same as the industries that confine and kill lambs, pigs, chickens, turkeys, and fish: all are pushed to grow abnormally quickly and slaughtered young. The animal food culture promotes domination and exploitation of the female and the feminine, which are full of life-giving and nurturing powers, and of infants and children, who are full of the powers of innocence and growth.
The Mustache Mask that hides the most sickening and inhumane industry practically imaginable. These docile vegetarian mothers and their unfortunate children are dominated from birth to death so humans can fatten themselves on dairy products and cow flesh. And the deeper justice is inescapable: by killing them, we kill ourselves; by enslaving them, we enslave ourselves; by sickening them, we sicken ourselves.
Instigating the rape, exploitation and death of other female animals, women may be viewed simultaneously by men as meat, mere objects to be used. Ironically, just as cows are forced to have unnaturally large and swollen mammary glands to overproduce milk for the dairy industry, the resulting foods produce unnaturally large mammary glands in the women who consume them -- a feature that is prized in our herding culture that further reinforces women's status as mere objects for the eyes of men. The interconnected dairy and meat industries perpetuate the patriarchal herding mentality that sees both animals and women as "meat," to be milked and eaten in one case and used sexually in the other.
Eggs: More Domination of the Feminine:
As with dairy products, when we buy eggs we instigate theft and violence against horribly abused females and contribute to environmental contamination, social pathology, and disease. In egg agribusiness, the same principles apply, and are taken to even further extremes. Sentient females are categorized and reduced to mere monetary units of production, imprisoned in unimaginably crowded, stressful, and filthy conditions, their eggs stolen -- and then, when they are no longer capable of producing at a high enough level, they are brutally killed.
Chicken eggs are toxic for humans...
Like all the animals whose bodies are used to produce food for our dining tables, chickens are seen as mere commodities. Individual chickens in egg-laying operations are so cheap to replace that they are virtually worthless and are treated as such. They spend their lives in battery cages, small wire prisons 14-16 inches high and 18-20 inches across, each containing 4-8 hens packed in so tightly that they can never spread their wings.... The wires chafe away most of their feathers, their heads, wings, or legs get stuck between the wires and thus starve to death, their rotting corpses are endured by other hens int he cage, their feet are painfully cut by the wires, the feces and urine from the 3-4 rows of cages above fall on their heads and bodies.... There are huge number of diseases inherent in the battery system... All family and social and natural life is destroyed...
As with the dairy industry, the egg industry is founded upon the total domination of the feminine, and upon the manipulation of female bodies to maximize profits with no regard to the outrageous cruelty involved. Female chicks are routinely debeaked, an exceedingly traumatic operation in which about half of the beak is chopped off. Many die on the spot. For those who survive, the chronic pain from this procedure may last their whole lives and interfere with eating. Male chicks are unneeded, so workers mass-annihilate them, either by live suffocation and crushing in large plastic trash bags or by dumping them into machines with rotating blades like wood chippers that turn them into instant chicken feed or fertilizer. Hens who no longer produce enough eggs also are disposed of in the wood chipping machines.
On modern chicken operations, the one goal is to cut costs and maximize the number of eggs that drop from the hen's uteruses. Over 250 eggs per year, more than 2.5 times the number hens would lay under more natural conditions. At the end of its laying cycle, if they aren't killed, they are often force-molted to shock their bodies into another cycle of egg laying. This is done by withholding food and water and administering a combination of drugs and hormones. The forced starvation may last up to 2 weeks, killing many of the birds in the process. ...We can perhaps be born into no worse hell in this universe than being a female chicken on an industrial egg farm in the United States.
In the so-called free-range egg operations, hens are typically debeaked, they are still treated as objects, males are all brutally killed at birth, and the term free-rang has little legal meaning.
The Web of Connections
Female cows and chickens are ruthlessly dominated to provide products that are vital and healthy for their offspring, community, and species but cause disease, pollution, hunger, and suffering when consumed by humans. When we steal their milk and eggs and kill their children, we set up the conditions for the same to happen to us. If we allow corporations to steal, use and kill cow and chicken babies, it will happen to our babies also. In fact, it is already happening.
The negative effects of consuming dairy products and eggs on individual health are linked to negative consequences for our world ecosystems and our culture. Everything is connected: the consumption of dairy products and eggs is linked with: allergies, skin disorders, cancer, heart disease, strokes, diabetes, aand a laundry list of other ailments; the arsenal of products and procedures marketed by the medical industry to combat these unnecessary ailments; the enormous profits accumulated by the agribusiness, chemical, pharmaceutical, and banking industries; the social inequality and injustice that this promotes, giving rise to elitism and further conflict; the poisoning of rivers, killing of fish; the lives lost in wars caused by spiraling demand for petroleum and by desperation, as water rights to go rich agribusiness dairy and chicken operations funded by US banks in Third World countries, while poor people face chronic thirst and contaminated water.
The web of connects is fast and includes all beings. We are feeding on other's fear and despair, on the violence that a patriarchal mentality systematically enforces on them. If we look deeply, we'll see that this mentality breeds violence in our lives as well. Should we, who long for mercy, freedom, and joy, and for a more enlightened society that supports peace and respect for our earth and the sacredness of all life, be the agents of such violence? When we make connects between our culturally induced desire to eat dairy and egg products and the cruelty to vulnerable mothers that this will necessarily entail, our intelligence and compassion are nourished, and we naturally being to make new choices. There are plenty of substitutes for animal-derived milk products and eggs.
Reviving Sophia
Dominating others requires us to disconnect from them, and from aspects of ourselves as well. In exploiting diary cows and hens, we specifically exploit their uteruses and mammary glands. This inhumane desecration of the most intimate and life-giving functions of the feminine principle, that of giving birth to new life and of tenderly nourishing that life, harms us perhaps as deeply as it does the cows, though our wounds may be less obvious.
Many spiritual teachers have pointed out that when we harm others, we harm ourselves even more severely. The hard-heartedness of the killer and exploiter is in itself a terrible punishment because it is a loss of sensitivity to the beauty and sacredness of life. That loss may go unrecognized, but the life itself, violent and competitive, is lived as struggle of separateness and underlying fear and its relations with others are poisoned.
By enslaving and cruelly exploiting mothers and babies, we attack and injure the sacred feminine within ourselves as well as in nature. This is an attack on our essential being, on our sense of nurturing life and protecting the vulnerable. These are truly terrible seeds to be sowing, for the feminine principle within us all is the seat of loving-kindness, receptivity, caring, and the urge to nurture and protect. In attacking our own inner feminine principle, we become as a culture harder and more separate, competitive, aggressive, and self-centered. Ironically, we become commodities ourselves, controlled and enslaved by a system of our own making, yet we don't realize it because we've been taught to disconnect. We block out the cries of mothers on dairies. We block out the cries of human mothers whose babies are taken from them -- thousands every day -- by easily preventable starvation. We block out the cries of mothers whose babies are killed by bombs and bullets fired by boys serving the military death machine.
Liberating and honoring the feminine principle is perhaps the most pressing task in our culture's evolution toward peace, sustainability, and spiritual maturity. The feminine, cross-culturally, is concerned fundamentally with nurturing, receptivity, making connections, intuition, and bringing forth new life. In our herding culture, these qualities are not respected, work requires men to become hard and cruel, and our separateness from and superiority to animals, nature and the life-giving processes of the feminine is emphasized. This has led to a patriarchal mentality concerned fundamentally with domination, control, separation, rational analysis, commodification, war, and killing. It's basic dictum is that might makes right. And yet the feminine principle is still alive, longed for, and beloved, because we know at the deepest levels that this is a vital aspect of our essential nature.
The herding culture has spread and conquered less aggressive culture and enforces its mentality of domination and its core practice of commodifying and eating animals. The usurper continues today, attacking nature, women, animals, and the vulnerable as it strives to consolidate control in a few elite hands. It derives power from the public's regular daily meals of hidden violence. Consuming and killing have become defining activities, fed by the disconnectedness and repressed guilt that accompany our suppression of the feminine principle. Beings are forced into the role of mere objects. The way hunters look at animals, the way corporations look at nature, and the way men are typically taught to look at women, and how women typically learn to be looked at by men, are all part of this process.
Enormous suffering is inevitable in all this, polluting relationships and eroding the spiritual sensitivity that sees beyond materialistic, I-it dualisms to the sacred subjects that are always present in living beings. As individuals and as a culture, our ability to heal, transform, and evolve beyond this old defiling mentality is tied to our food choices more than anything else. To meditate meditate for world peace, to pray for a better world, and to work for social justice and environmental protection while continuing to purchase the flesh, milk, and eggs of horribly abused animals exposes a disconnect that is so fundamental that it renders our efforts absurd, hypocritical, and doomed to certain failure.
We are hearing a call from our inner wisdom to reawaken respect for the feminine principle. Can we ever be successful in answering this call while still imprisoning, raping, abusing, and killing millions of mothers just for our pleasure, continuing our subservience to social pressure and indoctrination? The inner feminine is our intuition, our sensitivity, and our ability to sense the profound interconnectedness of events and beings, and it is vial to peace, wisdom, joy, intelligence, creativity, and spiritual awakening.
With every baby calf stolen from her mother and killed, with every gallon of milk stolen from enslaved and broken mothers, with every thrust of the raping sperm gun, with every egg stolen from a helpless, frantic hen, and will every baby chick killed or locked for life in a hellish nightmare cage, we kill the sacred feminine within ourselves. By ordering and eating products from the industrial herding complex that dominates the feminine with an iron fist, we squelch our opportunities for maturing to higher levels of understanding, sensitivity, and compassion. We remain merely ironic in our quests.
Our welfare is ultimately dependent on the welfare of others. By freeing and encouraging others we are liberated and encouraged. We can never sever our connection to all beings, but we can ignore and violate it, planting seeds of tragedy and suffering. Honoring our natural place in the web of life by eating the foods intended for us will plant seeds of abundance, love, and freedom, whatever our religion may be.
Achieving peace among other human beings, from the household to the international battlefields, depends upon treating each other with respect and kindness. This will be possible when we first extend that respect and kindness to those who are at our mercy and who cannot retaliate against us. If we are sincere in our quest for human peace, freedom, and dignity, we have no choice but to offer this to our neighbors, the animals of this earth. Cultivating awareness, we can transcend the imposed view that animals are mere food objects. With this, we will see consumerism, pornography, and the disconnectedness that leads inexorably to slavery and self-destructing evaporate. As the mentality of domination and exclusivism fades, we will be able to heal divisions of gender, race, and class
Source: The World Peace Diet. Eating for Spiritual and Social Harmony, Will Tuttle (2005)
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