this post was submitted on 06 Jan 2026
36 points (83.3% liked)
Revolutionary Veganism
345 readers
1 users here now
The revolution will be powered by tofu
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Most of this is fine [environmental stuff, forced insemination], but some others are kinda...pointless?
"Made for Calves, not humans." Okay? Hot peppers are made for birds, not mammals, and we eats plenty of those.
"Available only because her own child was denied it." I don't think they care tbh. Unless there's a psychological effect on the calf here I'm failing to understand why I should care.
"Something humans don't need to thrive" i agree with that, but I don't get why other animals are mentioned as examples. Firstly, goat milk is also a thing. Secondly it would make more sense to focus on things humans already consider unethical, i.e, shark fin or ivory. If we can live without those we don't necessarily need milk either
This point is usually made because an alarming number of people aren't aware of the basic fact that cows need to be made pregnant in order to produce milk. They believe that cows are just 24/7 milk producing machines, and thus it is no harm to simply just "take" the milk they produce automatically, rather than understanding that you have to separate them from their children who you feed formula while their mothers pine for them.
Goat milk is nowhere near as ubiquitous as cow milk, so it's not as relevant. Also unlike shark fin or ivory, a large number of people believe that dairy is a necessary part of a healthy diet. This belief is reinforced in schools in many countries, as well as in popular media and culture.
Vegan arguments such as these are not made in abstract or pulled from thin air, it's because these specific points get brought up by people all the time, even if they do sound very silly to us. I've personally heard variations of these previous two (cows just make milk, dairy is necessary for humans) easily over a hundred times in real life.
I wonder how many people would stop drinking milk if they knew it contained white blood cells from the cow. There's also cells from the lining of the udder. Pasteurization kills it but... it's still there.
This came straight from the dairy industry, much like almost all popular nutrition "facts". Same with the 90s food pyramid that said you should eat 8 whole portions of grain per day lol. We just take it for granted because we trust them, it feels very boomer somehow. I feel like the generations after X stopped trusting corporations on an inherent basis, or at least not as much.
Why would blood cells and lining make someone want to stop drinking milk? I'm confused
I doubt anyone would care. People are just used to whatever is normalised on a cultural level. They often eat the inner linings from animals' intestines for sausages, for example. It's also completely normalised to have hacked-off pieces or even entire corpses actively rotting (albeit relatively slowly) inside your fridge; so the concept of disgust doesn't really factor in so long as you're used to it.
It has also been my experience that people who act concerned about something like soy having phytoestrogens in it suddenly stop caring when it's pointed out to them that cow milk contains actual mammalian estrogen. The "concerns" they often express are rarely genuine.
As someone with a baby I can tell you they care plenty when they're denied milk. They also don't like being murdered presumably, although I haven't tested this hypothesis.
Half the calves (the males, the ones who will never produce milk) get murdered for veal nearly immediately.
The other half (the females, who will likely produce milk someday) live in tiny pens, so small they can barely turn around, and they, of course, are forced to shit and piss in this tiny area and never leave it. These baby cows are fed the worst fucking shit-ass formula that smells absolutely foul, worse than you can believe. I have experience with this stage in the dairy process because when I was a child, I often helped my neighbor/friend with her chores, which consisted mainly of feeding these poor cows. It's not a fate I would wish on any creature. I think maybe the baby cows murdered for veal have it better.
As for the mothers, yes, of course they care that their children are being taken away from them! They're mammals, and, broadly speaking, mammalian mothers nurture their young. If you don't believe me, you have only to search YouTube and you'll find dozens of videos of mother cows chasing after people stealing their children. There are so many. I'm not going to look any up for you for the simple reason that I don't want to cry tonight.
Dairy is, in my opinion, worse than flesh. The veal industry wouldn't exist without the dairy industry. Every dairy cow is murdered at the end of her life, just as every meat cow is. But the dairy cows live through four or five years of daily torture before they are murdered, whereas the meat cows are only alive for a little over a year.