"Ditch Dairy"

Philip Wollen's Foreword

"Ditch Dairy"

Like most people, I once believed that dairy was the bucolic, peaceful image of green pastures and crystal streams, rolling hills and the poetry of Wordsworth and Shelley.

Little did I know that behind the dairy walls was a cruel industrial juggernaut, a vile gulag of despair.

During a business trip to India I saw a milkman dragging and whipping a cow.

She had been badly injured in an accident with a lorry.

To get her to move, he threw chili powder in her eyes, and shoved sharp objects up her anus.

He had a chain around her neck and forced her to walk with a broken leg and severe injuries to her spine.

Beside her walked her scrawny, starving and terrified calf, ribs protruding and her skinny legs trembling.

At the slaughterhouse gate, he unchained her.

But before he handed her over to the slaughter-man, the bastard milked her.

If that sight does not change the heart of a man, nothing will.

I discovered that milk was meat in liquid form.

I was astonished that this could happen in a country like India, a nation where the cow is revered as a “mother” by the Hindus and Jains who worship her. And in a nation whose holy book, the Upanishads, gave us the beautiful word “Ahimsa”, meaning “non-violence to any living being”. And whose National Constitution specifically states in article 51(A)(g) that the fundamental duty of every citizen is “to have Compassion for living creatures.”

If this degree of cruelty could be committed so blatantly in a nation whose foundations and cornerstones were firmly built on Kindness to animals, I wondered what treatment would be meted out to innocent animals in countries where these qualities were not enshrined in their faith or their Constitutions?

I did not have to look far.

When I returned home to Australia, I was horrified to discover the truth about our dairy.

Driving through the dairy belt, pretty townships on the surface, concealing cruel gulags of despair – out of sight and out of mind.

They  reminded me of the Potemkin villages, the fake facades of villages constructed by Prince Gregory Potemkin along the banks of the Dnieper River to fool Empress Catherine the Great as she passed through Crimea.

On these dairies I saw cows being forcibly impregnated, rough hands of brutal men shoving bull semen into the backsides of terrified cows - female genitalia assaulted for money; their horns sawn off close to the skull, with no pain medication; male calves castrated without pain relief; terrified, bellowing sentient animals immobilized in crush pens as they were castrated, dehorned with electric saws, dis-budded, or tail-docked and branded with a hot iron bar; Sometimes they were “electro-immobilized” – a process which does nothing to reduce the agony, it simply renders the animal immobile.

It is a tragic sight to see these docile creatures, hideously abused and in considerable pain, also suffering from lameness and mastitis.

The births of calves are induced so they occur at approximately the same time (for so called “management purposes)”.

Consequently, a large number of calves are premature and are “unviable”, unsuitable to be sold as veal. They are killed by smashing in their skulls with a hammer or crushing their rib-cages with a fist or a foot.

But of course, the agony does not end there.

Bobby calves, a day or two old, are taken away from their mothers, starved for up to 36 hours as they are loaded onto trucks transported to the slaughterhouse. The grieving mothers bellow for their child until the whole ghastly process starts again.

All this violence and for what?

We already know that we are an oddity, the only species that drinks the milk of another species.

And we know that almost 2 out of every 3 people suffer from some degree of lactose intolerance after infancy.

There is abundant medical science showing that milk is killing human beings. The Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (amongst many others) have covered this issue extensively.

And these diseases caused by dairy consumption are blowing out the health budgets of even the richest nations.

We already know that the dairy industry is a profligate waster of precious water.

And we know that greenhouse gas emissions from livestock release more greenhouse gas pollution than all of transport put together, cars, trains, buses, ships, and ‘planes.

Victor Hugo said “There is nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come”.

But I say “There is nothing more destructive than a bad idea whose time has passed”.

The time for dairy has passed, if it ever existed in the first place.

It has no place in a modern, enlightened, healthy society.

Particularly where there is such a massive array of healthy, tasty, environmentally friendly, inexpensive and cruelty-free alternatives available on our doorstep.

With all this overwhelming evidence stacked up against it, the only rational conclusion must be clear.

Lets’ ditch dairy. . . .

Once and for all.