Lacto-Ovo-Vegetarianism

1679: 

Edited by CJ Tointon

Here's a quote from the first vegan publication back in the 1940's: "Lacto-Vegetarianism is but a half-way house between flesh eating and a truly humane, civilised diet … we should try to evolve sufficiently to make the full journey".

Vegetarianism is often as far as many people will go. They don't wish to look any deeper in case they find out more than they bargained for. They don't want to put 'milk and egg production' in the same category of cruelty as they do 'meat'. If they did, they should logically determine that they would have to become vegan!  Milk is a product derived from animal cruelty. It is also a dangerously misrepresented substance. It's promoted as being a good source of calcium, whereas in reality, it has the opposite effect. It leaches calcium from the bones. And it's a processed food, which means it's pasteurised 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's ubiquitous. It turns up as an ingredient in many popular food items. It's likely that users of milk will not want to know any details about the animal cruelty involved in its production. They stick with the line: "If cows weren't milked they'd die" and they ignore the rest of the story. 

The biological details of milk production go something like this:  A cow's biology determines the quantity of milk she produces. Whilst there's normally very little milk being produced; this alters when the cow becomes pregnant - she makes lots of it! Once impregnated and after giving birth to a calf, her mammary glands go into overdrive. This is just what the 'dairy farmer' wants. A male calf, however, is regarded as a dispensable item after having served his main purpose in utero and he's killed just after birth to allow the huge quantities of his mother's milk to be diverted - for human consumption! Sometimes a female calf will be 'trained' to replace her mother as a milking cow. With continuous impregnation (calf bearing), subsequent loss of her calves plus constant milking, she is soon exhausted and her milk yield becomes so low as to make her no longer economically viable. She will live only ten of her normally twenty years before being sent off for slaughter. That's 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 many so-called 'Animal Welfare' Organisations don't want to hear this story either, since it would oblige them to speak out against the dairy industry. To keep their membership happy (and retain their 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. They fear losing the support of milk drinkers and egg eaters and the users of the many thousands of commercial foodstuffs loaded with these products.