By-products that are used for food

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Where is your cut-off point? Unless you feel a strong enough empathic connection with the dairy cow (or Animal Rights) it’s likely you’ll make a decision to keep using animal by-products. If you feel strongly about liberating animals in general (from being used for food) dairy must be tackled first.

Because people have most difficulty in giving up dairy products, they don’t look at the ethics of milk production. It’s because of that reluctance that Animal Rights can’t get a foothold. Unless a by-product boycott is established, no amount no-meat-eating will free farm animals.

In the end it all comes down to denouncing all animal cruelty, not just some of it.

Milk and eggs are a big part of daily life, along with cheese, butter, yoghurt, cream and various confections.  The animal by-products are regarded as benign, as if anything so useful or so delicious could ever be tainted, and yet ethically, if not also nutritionally, these products are dangerous. The animals who produce them suffer as do the humans who ingest them. Certainly, behind the production of both milk and eggs is an ugly system of animal abuse.

Dairy products particularly are hard to ignore because they’ve insinuated themselves into so many food products. For example, if you read the ingredients label on almost any commercial cake or biscuit, you’ll find ‘milk products’ (and/or ‘egg products’) have been used. Read the ingredients list. I once counted over two hundred supermarket food items which contained milk or egg. I suspect that most people would not be prepared to deny themselves that many food items for ethical reasons.

            Today we may be well informed, but temptation is great. Few people boycott dairy products or egg ingredients because of the way cows and hens are treated. Most times we remain uninformed purposely; we choose to remain ignorant to avoid the inconvenience of ruling out certain foods. 

Lacto-ovo vegetarianism

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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.

What? No more meat, or milk, or eggs?

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For those people who find giving up animal products difficult to contemplate there is a dilemma. To stop eating meat but continuing eating cheese doesn’t mean we lead a cruelty-free life. The thousands of products on the market, making use of milk and eggs, perpetuates the dairy and egg industry. And a cruel business it is, for the animals concerned. Imagine a biscuit – one the ‘essential’ ingredients is egg, laid by a caged bird (biscuit manufacturers don’t use free-range eggs!). If there’s milk involved in the recipe that won’t be soy milk but milk from the cow. And she has her milk mechanically sucked out of her udder, milk which should be feeding her calf (the calf usually having to be got rid of). That very simply is the situation for all egg-milk producers. Lacto-ovo vegetarians stop eating animals for both health and ethical reasons and certainly they do far more for farm animals than their meat-eating friends. But because not all exploited animals are reared for meat it is debatable as to which suffers most, the dairy cow or the beef steer. Each is held captive, denied any sort of natural life and ultimately has his/her life brutally terminated at the abattoir. The same comparison applies between egg-laying hens and chickens reared for meat, they each live in confinement and each die a terrible death. The milk or egg producing animals often suffer more than ‘meat’ animals.

The start of a slow change

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In 1944 the first Vegan publication put it this way. “The great impediment to man’s moral development may be that he is a parasite on lower forms of animal life”. Since the 1940’s, when some people started to eat solely from plant-based foods - without becoming ill - there was, for the first time in human history, a safe release from our dependency on animals, for food. A vegan regime was shown to be nutritionally healthy. From then on, we were able to look ahead to better times to come. At last there was a safe possibility, to eat from plants and dress ourselves in non-animal clothing; from the fifties with the development of synthetic materials to supplement plant-based fabrics we could avoid the leather and wool and silk. Soon after, there came onto the market plant-based foods like soy milk and textured vegetable protein, in the form of good-to-eat products which could replace meats and dairy products. From then on we could see a time when the use of animal products would be totally unnecessary; we could look ahead to a very different world where meat, dairy, eggs, leather and wool would be seen as inhumane and unsustainable products from a less enlightened era.

Animals that are used for food

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I’d like to go back to basics for the next series of blogs, to recap on some of the reasons why we shouldn’t be using animals for food. This is at the heart of veganism, of boycotting any industry that uses animals for any purpose whatever. Humans have realized that animals can be profited from and that there are no constraints on exploiting them - the general public will not complain as long as the producers give them what they want and no one informs the customer too often about what really happens on farms and abattoirs. The animals themselves can’t fight back so there’s no danger from them.

In the animal industries, worldwide, there is fierce competition for market share, and this has led the Industry to lay aside welfare considerations in order to produce food and clothing at the lowest price possible. Animal suffering is no longer a consideration. I’m mainly concentrating here on the food industry, where animals are used for food.

My reaction to animals being used as production machines is simply to say that it’s inhumane to confine animals, kill them, butcher their bodies and eat them! The very idea of denying animals their freedom or any semblance of natural social life, keeping them in slum conditions, and then, on their execution day, hanging them upside down to bleed to death, is obscene. However badly we may want to eat their bodies and secretions there is nothing which can justify this sort of barbarity.

We might have arrived at this point in human history for a reason: to review our own barbarous nature in relation to the way we treat these animals. But it gets worse, for if cruel and callous things can be done to entirely innocent animals like cows, steers, pigs and sheep, how much worse is it for the very young of those species? Imagine how it is for the ‘children’ of the animal world, the six week old pullets, piglets, calves and lambs.

            The sheer horror of what is happening to animals, on a mass scale, all around the world, makes me (and many others like me) want to do anything we can to change peoples’ attitudes, to stop them buying into the trade in animals. Perhaps the most powerful argument we can offer is to point out some of the terrible things being done both at farms and abattoirs. But many of us have tried doing that and found the ‘shock-horror’ approach ineffective; it seems that when most people do what most others do then it allows them to follow suit without the need to think about what they do. The feel covered by common practice. Most people are reluctant to think too deeply about using-animals. “Ho hum” they say, and “All very sad, but that’s just the way things are. We humans have been eating animals for a million years. We aren’t likely to change now!!”.

But we are changing, especially here in the Western world where we are more fully informed about animal exploitation. We are changing because the shame is too great. But change is still slow.

I dare you NOT to read this. But if you do ...

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Right now, as you read this, thousands, no millions, no, in fact billions of beautiful, sensitive, sentient animals are struggling. They are in a hopeless position, powerless against human oppression. They are suffering confinement, harsh treatment, and violence. They are each victims of the singular human intention to have them die a horrible death in an abattoir.

            If you eat anything from an animal, if you wear anything from the animal’s body, then you are connected to the lives of these terrorised animals; you are partly responsible for the conditions captive animals find themselves in. Harsh accusatory words indeed! But would anyone say they were not true?

            Vegans are not connected to any of this, since they have purposely disassociated themselves from the whole ugly situation. Non-vegans are connected (some less than others) simply because they are unwilling to forgo animal-based foods and yummy treats. The omnivore can’t imagine a life without ‘animal’, in much the same way as one can’t imagine life without a car or a computer or a television. In our materialistic world there are so many other items we’re all used to having, but it’s likely that while each one damages the planet or damages our health, there is even worse damage done to ourselves.

            Using items from the hell-holes in which animals are kept and hurt and executed wrecks the human conscience. Nothing else that we do or buy or use compares to our involvement with the grotesque treatment of farm animals. If you saw what they do to these creatures, first hand, you would vomit. You’d scream, you’d run. You’d swear never to be party to any of it ever again. And this is why the guys who run these places never let you into abattoirs or intensive farms these days. The way they treat these invisible billions, including birds, mammals and fish is nothing short of demonic. Each creature is taken out of their natural surroundings, deprived of every social, sensual and sexual experience they’d normally have in Nature, and exploited to the very edge of biological toleration, just to provide humans with their little comforts.

            The inconvenient truth of these angry-sounding words won’t do the animals themselves much good, but if one is describing a hurricane one can’t talk about it in terms of a firm breeze. To describe these animals’ lives in any other way would be dishonest. I know that it’s much wiser to use softer language. If I did you would still be reading whereas I know that most readers would have turned away about three paragraphs ago. But, just for once, I don’t feel like downplaying the shame, guilt and sorrow we should all be feeling. Perhaps it’s because we’ve always talked too timidly about these matters, that we’ve by-passed the full horror of the present situation. I think you’ll agree that this is the one subject that is never properly talked about.

            However, as easily as I could go on at length, to describe the conditions of each animal on the farm, whether they are living on the free-range or in intensive operations, it wouldn’t help people to unravel their own temperamental blocks, that stop them thinking about what they are doing, when eating animal-based foods. Most of our most dangerous behaviours are mindless copying of what others do, because how could you possibly enjoy eating your dinner with thoughts of suffering animals running through your head? 

Next series of blogs starts tomorrow

Why vegan principles are the logical starting point

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What is it that stops people discussing animal cruelty, stops them considering ending their use of animals. They know more or less what happens to animals on farms, they know that the animal industry is implicated in cruelty, but they also know how much they want to eat animal foods. Humans all over the world are addicted to them. They can’t stop watching cooking shows on TV for new ways of preparing their favourite animal based dishes. And if people are addicted to their food they value their freedom of choice; they feel they have a right to choose from whatever is on sale in the shops, whether it be in the form of food or clothing or any other commodity that makes life more pleasant. On the face of things, it would seem unrealistic to hope that people would simply give up these (mainly) foods, not for their own health’s sake but for the sake of the animals. Humans aren’t yet ready to be that selfless. 

            Now, look at it another way. Foods and material comforts aside, is there something in life worth more than anything else, for which the ‘giving up’ of delicious foods would be but a small sacrifice. Some might suggest avoiding animal-based foods will preserve good health. Others though would suggest the need to preserve good ethics. For those of us who highly value ethics there is one central question. I ask myself  “What is my life for, beyond mere existence?”

            The way the world is at present, with it’s crass materialism and routine violence, it forces me to reflect on the extent I am personally involved in supporting such a world. Do I focus solely on myself. Is that a problem for many others? Is this why health enthusiasts are very often vegetarian but have no interest in promoting animal rights or looking any deeper than personal welfare?

            To effectively get to the bottom of things, we surely have to look at the human temperament. Look for clues as to HOW to reform our violent and self-centred natures, and then to attempt to change at that level before we try to change the world. And indeed, we can’t change the world directly until we are a living example of rebellion against violence and self-interest. Because food is so heavily connected with self-interest and violence and the use of food is so routine, this is surely where we must make a start. The first specific change most people need to make should be to the habits which are most damaging, most routine and least thought about. Which is why vegan principle is such an important starting line.