Lacto-ovo vegetarianism

676:

Quoting from the first vegan publication, “Lacto-vegetarianism is but a half-way house between flesh eating and a truly humane, civilized diet ... we should try to evolve sufficiently to make the full journey”.

Vegetarianism is often as far as many people will go, not wishing to look deeper in case they find out more than they bargain for. They don’t want to put milk and egg production in the same category of cruelty as they do meat, because if they did, they know logically that they’d have to become vegan. Milk, for example, is a product involving animal cruelty. It is also a dangerously misrepresented substance - promoted as a good supply of calcium whereas in reality it has the opposite effect, of leaching calcium from the bones. So even though milk contains calcium, it ends up sapping our bones of that crucial mineral. And since it is a processed food, it being pasteurized and homogenised, these processes further alter milk’s chemistry and actually increase its detrimental acidifying effects.

            But milk is a problem on another level. It is ubiquitous, it turns up as an ingredient in so many popular food items. For this reason it’s likely that users of milk will NOT want to know the details of how it is produced for fear of their having to black-list all the milk products they use. They stick with the line that “if cows weren’t milked they’d die” (which is quite true, as far as it goes), but the rest of the story they ignore. The biological details of milk production go something like this:

            A cow’s biology determines the quantity of milk she produces and whilst there’s normally too little being produced to be of much interest, that alters as soon as she becomes pregnant. Then, she makes lots of it. Once impregnated and after giving birth to a calf, her mammary glands go into over-drive. It’s just what the dairy farmer wants. However, the calf, having served its main purpose in uteri, is often then regarded as a dispensable item and killed just after birth to allow the huge quantities of its mother’s milk to be diverted for human consumption. With continuous impregnation (calf bearing) and subsequent loss of her calves, plus constant milking, she is soon exhausted and her milk yield then becomes so low that she is no longer economically viable. She will live only ten of her normally twenty years before being sent for slaughter. That’s all the thanks she gets for producing vast quantities of milk for the farmers and their milk-drinking customers! It’s an ugly story that omnivores often don’t want to hear.

            I suspect most so called ‘animal welfare’ organisations don’t want to hear this story either, since it would oblige them to speak out against the egg and dairy industries. To keep their membership happy, but retain most of the organisation’s integrity, they prefer to concentrate on factory farming and the evils of meat eating. They promote vegetarianism in order to win substantial support from the general public but rarely speak out against the broader welfare issues, for fear of losing the support of milk drinkers and egg eaters, and the users of the many thousands of commercial foodstuffs loaded with these products.