There are two other large categories of animal products that we eat even though they are not food for humans: dairy products and eggs. Many people who take a close look at dairy and egg operations say that they are in some ways more toxic and cruel than those dealing only with the flesh of animals, because the cows and chickens are severely abused for longer periods and inevitably slaughtered when their productivity declines. Fundamentally, cow’s milk is a substance designed by nature for baby cows, not for humans. We are the only species that drinks the milk intended for the young of other species, and we are the only species that insists on drinking milk beyond the time of weaning.
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.
Dairy cows are impregnated at a much younger age than would ever occur in the wild, and are kept pregnant virtually continuously, even while they are lactating from the previous pregnancy. The enormous strain of being pushed so hard to produce such abnormally large quantities of milk quickly destroys the health of these cows. Though they would naturally live twenty-five years in the wild, after about four years of this dairy abuse their “productivity” drops off. They are then forced to endure the brutality of the slaughter house and be reduced to inexpensive hamburger meat, leather, and animal feed.
How are the mother cows actually pushed to produce such gigantic volumes of milk? They are forced to eat cholesterol in their feed and are injected with a blend of hormones, including estrogen, progesterone, prolactin, and testosterone. Dairy consumers receive little protection from these hormones, since regulations on using them are minimal.
Dairy farmers also discovered long ago that if cows were fed cholesterol-rich foods, they would give a lot more milk. Of course, an adult cow in the wild is a complete herbivore and would never eat animal flesh, milk, or eggs (the only sources of cholesterol, which is absent in all plant foods). But dairy cows, like many other farmed animals enduring the debasement of modern industrialized agriculture, are given feed “enriched” with animal flesh and offal, by-products from the slaughter of fish, birds, and other mammals, including perhaps other cows and even their own calves.
Because each dairy cow is forced to produce far more calves than can be used on the dairy, her calves are immediately slaughtered, auctioned to veal operations, or auctioned to build beef herds and killed at one to two years of age.
Cows have thus been routinely forced to eat other cows, and quite possibly the flesh and organs of their own young, in their “enriched” feed. The only reason this may now be stopping is the outbreak of mad cow disease, a direct result of such mad agricultural practices.
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.
Nature never intended us to drink milk intended for the offspring of another species, particularly cows. Cow’s milk is specifically suited to the nutritional needs of herd animals who double their weight in only forty-seven days, weigh three hundred pounds within fourteen weeks, and grow four healthy stomachs! Cow’s milk contains three times as much protein as human milk and about fifty percent more fat. Cow’s milk is far too coarse, especially for young children who are growing delicate brain, nervous system, and other tissues. Human children are not calves! Infant brain and nerve tissue are best grown with the nutrients in human milk.
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.
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 her mother as early as possible so as not to waste the mother’s marketable milk.
Whereas in the wild a heifer would not be ready to have her first calf for at least three to five years, that is far too long to feed her without getting milk money from her. Cow feed is expensive, so operators want to get her into production quickly, which means getting her pregnant as soon as possible, in just a year or less, when she is still a mere child in human terms. This is accomplished through hormone manipulation, administering excessive amounts of estrogen and other hormones.
As soon as she gives birth, the cow’s baby will be quickly stolen from her, and she will be milked two to three times per day by the milking machines.
Right after the cow begins to be milked, she is again inseminated… She is thus both pregnant and lactating simultaneously, and will be taken off the milking machine only during the last two months of pregnancy. As soon as she gives birth, the baby is again taken away, and she goes back on the milking machine and is inseminated again. …After three to five years, these mother cows, dairy slaves, are worn out and sent off in overcrowded trucks to face the final insulting brutality of the slaughterhouse.
The same scenarios apply to dairies that produce so-called organic milk products, except that the feed is organic, there is a limit to some of the hormones and other toxins, and there may be a little more space in the prison stall. The cows are still slaughtered after a few years, and the same pricing mechanism drives the industry: to get the most milk for the cheapest price. Individual cows are worth very little, since maximizing pregnancies boosts milk production and there are always more calves on hand than can be used.
The second possible path for calves born on the dairy: 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 for dairy-born calves is to be auctioned to the veal industry. Both males and females are forced down this dark and miserable path when they are not needed on the dairy (this includes organic dairies).
Since bovines in the wild easily live twenty to thirty 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. In this it is the same as the industries that confine and kill lambs, pigs, chickens, turkeys, and fish: all are pushed to grow abnormally quickly and are 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.
Mother cows, like all lactating mammals, produce high levels of estrogen in their milk. It is not healthy for humans to take in this high estrogen load at any age. One obvious result is that young girls’ bodies are unnaturally pushed to become sexually mature at an early age.
The unnaturally early menarche in our culture causes untold anguish, with unnecessary teen pregnancies, abortion dilemmas and debates, and unnatural physical, psychological, and social stress that is simply a result of pushing our girls into sexual maturity too early, just as we do to the young cow slaves on the dairy.
As they eat milk products, 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 over-produce 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 and 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.
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.
Chicken eggs are toxic for humans in the manner of all animal products. First, they are made up of animal protein, saturated fat, and cholesterol, all three of which clog arteries, acidify blood and tissues, impair the immune system, and stress the body in a variety of ways, as has been discussed. Eggs, in fact, are the most concentrated packets of cholesterol available in supermarkets. Second, eggs concentrate noxious pesticide, chemical, hormonal, and bacterial residue. Third, eating eggs is eating the vibrations of misery.
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 fourteen to sixteen inches high and eighteen to twenty inches across, each containing four to eight hens packed in so tightly that they can never spread their wings.
Male chicks are unneeded, so workers mass-annihilate them, either by live suffocation and crushing in large plastic trash bags or by dumping them living into machines with rotating blades like wood chippers that turn them into instant chicken feed or fertilizer. Hens who no longer produce enough eggs have also been disposed of by being thrown living into the spinning blades of wood chipping machines.
The egg industry acknowledges the huge number of diseases and syndromes that are inherent in the battery system… It is well established that antibiotics are given to battery hens in basically one hundred percent of egg operations to control the bacterial diseases that thrive in these squalid conditions.
On modern chicken operations, this is over 250 eggs per year, more than two and a half times the number hens would lay under more natural conditions. In nature, a hen is particular about her nest and often chooses the right place to lay her precious egg in partnership with a rooster.
All family and social and natural life is destroyed. These hens know neither mothers nor children, neither mates nor earth nor sun. They are born in hatcheries, debeaked and then sentenced to the caged slavery of egg production.
In so-called free-range egg operations the hens are all typically debeaked, as in standard egg factories, and males are all brutally killed at birth. The chickens are still treated as objects, pushed to produce, and killed cruelly when they are no longer profitable. The term free-range has surprisingly little legal meaning, and there are thus no rules governing the amount of space a free-range hen must have, so though their confinement may be less extreme than the usual battery cages, they are nevertheless typically crammed together in enormous, stinking sheds where they never see the light of day.
Dominating others requires us to disconnect from them, and from aspects of ourselves as well. In exploiting dairy cows and hens, we dominate them not just for their flesh, skin, bones, and the other body parts that we can use or sell, 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, armored, violent, and competitive, is lived as a struggle of separateness and underlying fear, and its relations with others are poisoned.
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 learn to cover our ears to block out the plaintive cries of cow mothers on dairies. We block out the cries of human mothers whose babies are taken from them—thousands everyday—by easily preventable starvation. …Who will hear or heed our cries if we don’t heed the cries of these mothers?
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 principle, 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 because the work of herding animals requires men to become hard and cruel, and to emphasize their separateness from and superiority to animals, nature, and the life-giving processes of the feminine. This has led to a patriarchal mentality concerned fundamentally with domination, control, separation, rational analysis, commodification, war, and killing.
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 who are the subjects of their lives are forced into the role of mere objects, and both people and animals end up becoming things. The way hunters, fishers, and herders look at animals, the way corporate developers 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.
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 vital to peace, wisdom, joy, intelligence, creativity, and spiritual awakening.
Achieving peace among 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-destruction evaporate. As the mentality of domination and exclusivism fades, we will be able to heal divisions of gender, race, and class.