Veganism Supports Feminism
Mabeline Ong On
International Women’s Day, the world celebrates feminism and equality and we look forward to the day when equality between all genders is achieved in the world and that oppression of women will be a thing of the past. However, the largest scale exploitation of the female carries on right beneath our noses – the dairy industry and the egg industry. In this article, we focus on the dairy industry and discuss how supporting the dairy industry is inconsistent with the cause of feminism.
The Dairy Industry Today
Often, dairy companies market their products with images of carefree cows on wide fields, portraying the dairy cows as being happy to be milked for human consumption. However, this could be no further from the truth. Almost all commercial milk consumed today comes from factory farms. The goal of factory farms, as with every other capitalist institution – to reduce cost and increase profit. It is so obvious, yet so easy to miss. Female cows need to be lactating on order to produce milk. In order to be lactating, they need to have been pregnant and given birth. Dairy cows in factory farms are artificially inseminated with a sperm gun in order to get them pregnant, as it is too expensive to breed male cows and allow the cows to naturally mate. The process of artificial insemination is painful for the cows and done against their will. What word you use to describe this violation is up to you, but the focus should remain on the violation, rather than the terminology used. A cow’s pregnancy lasts as long as a human’s pregnancy, i.e. 9 months. After 9 long months of having bonded with her baby, the cow gives birth. Within hours of birth, the calf is taken away from their mother, while the mother is restrained. Like any human mother would, a mother cow grieves when her child is stolen from her. She never gets to see her child again.
"The worst scream I ever heard, let me tell you, I have heard them all first hand. When I started finding out about this stuff … I was like everybody else. I didn’t believe it was that bad. I thought everybody was exaggerating. … I actually went to go see what was going on. I spent six weeks at Thorn Apple Pig Valley Slaughter House in Detroit in 1993. I broke into animal research laboratories, I broke into fur farms. I went behind the scenes at every circus and every rodeo that came through Michigan. But the worst scream I have ever heard was a mother cow on a dairy farm. As she screams and bellows her lungs out day after day for her stolen baby to be given back to her. And I can only imagine the same scream every woman in this room would make, if somebody held you down after birth and stole your newborn baby from you. ” -Gary Yourofsky
Very soon after the loss of her child, the milking process begins. The lactating mother is brought into metal enclosures and milking devices are painfully clamped onto her nipples. The cow is milked an unnatural 90 to 110 pounds of milk a day for a full seven to eight months. As dairy cows are milked several times a day, they often to get painful infections on their nipples. Day and night she is injected with antibiotics and hormones to encourage her body to increase the production of milk. The cycle then repeats for the cow until her bones become too brittle for her to stand long hours because so much of her body’s nutrients go into the unnaturally high production of milk. The natural lifespan of a cow in the wild is 20-25 years. However, the milk cow is usually sent to slaughter at the age of 4-5 years because she is no longer healthy enough to produce milk and remain profitable. As for the calf, it never gets to suckle or lean in to feel their mother’s warmth. The milk that is meant for the calf is exploited for human commercial use, to line the shelves of our supermarkets, to be fed to both young and full-grown humans. The female calves may be raised to be dairy cows, while the male and unhealthy cows are “unnecessary” to the farm and are usually slaughtered for veal and leather. This is just a brief picture of the prevalent dairy industry in our world today.
How are Cows Linked to Feminism?
The mother cow is a perhaps one of the most obvious symbols of maternal instinct, and yet this maternal instinct is being blatantly exploited for commercial ends. The very foundation of the dairy industry is the exploitation of every sexual organ of the dairy cow. (It should of course be mentioned that male cows that are bred and exploited for sperms to be used for artificial insemination, though usually on a smaller scale as the main driver of the business is the product from the female cow.)It might be possible that the way we see female cows may be a reflection of a subconscious worldview on the treatment of women. One might be protesting, “no, no, no, these are cows, not humans.” However, therein lies the root of inequality. Equality first happens in the mind – it is how we see one individual from the next. If we think that it is fine to afford different treatment to one being from another, then it may not be too far a stretch to say that it is fine to treat women differently from men. Even if we cannot agree that the treatment of cows cannot be compared to the treatment of humans, we can agree that it can never be right to take a baby away from its mother. By consuming dairy, we are supporting the industry, and we are saying that it is acceptable to treat female beings this way. Dairy has become so integral to our culture that we have desensitized ourselves to the cruelty and pain that dairy cows face on a daily basis. We have somehow convinced ourselves that cows desire and need to be milked, or else they would have too much milk in their udders. Yet we overlook that the reasons why the cow might have too much milk in their udders is that her baby, the intended consumer of her milk was taken away from her, compounded with the fact that the farmer injects her with various hormones to unnaturally increase her milk production. It is easy to draw the parallel with various instances of the exploitation of women. The most obvious being the sex work industry where the abuse of women is so prevalent? It is easy to think that sex workers desire to be sexually exploited and abused. Yet, the very reason why the sex trade exists is because of the objectification of women (and sometimes men) as mere tools for sexual pleasure. Just as a dairy cow’s emotion and pain are ignored, so are many women in the sex trade so treated. We can treat dairy cows this way, simply because they do not retaliate, they are easy to use. Just as how so many women in history have tolerated abused and being undermined, simply because they do not fight back. The extent of violence and abuse in the dairy industry is the most widespread reminder of the patriarchy inherited from thousand years of the oppression of women, condoned by both feminists and non-feminists. If we would like equality to become a reality, we need to adjust our worldview. No exploitation of any female being is ever justified. Quoting Maimonides: “It should not be believed that all beings exist for the sake of the existence of man. On the contrary, all the other beings too have been intended for their own sakes and not the sake of anything else.” Women do not exist for the sake of men, neither do female cows exist for the sake of human consumption. Let’s go dairy-free to support the empowerment of the female! I would like to take this opportunity to make a tribute in remembrance to the billions of 29 billion cows who suffer and die in the meat and dairy industry.
A Tribute to the Voiceless Females
She doesn’t get days off. She stands for hours a day in her faeces, diarrhea and urine. She doesn’t have a name. She is merely a number on a tag, pierced through her ear. She is raped, with a metal rod. She gives birth to the only joy in her life but it is not hers to keep. Her baby is grabbed by the ears, by the neck, and taken away from her. She follows the man, protests, in her own gentle way. But her baby is property, and not hers. She is broken, on the ground. Everyone hears her cries, but no one listens. She is pushed onto her feet, herded into a metal cage. Metal contraption is clamped painfully onto her nipples, taking away the life-giving liquid meant to nourish her baby. Several times a day. Every day. She could have been punched, she could have been kicked. But she never knew anything tenderer. She is raped again when the milk runs out. And everything happens again. Had it been 4 years? Her legs had started to crumble. The truck arrived and she was led onto the truck. She didn’t protest, for she trusted the hands that handled her. In that moment, she was only cargo. And then she was no more.