The Mothers of Dairy
A newborn calf is wheeled away from her mother at Lowfields, moments after birth. Picture: Animal Justice Project.
I became vegan when my daughter was seven. Already a vegetarian, I’d been skirting the issue for months because, well, I liked cheese. But from everything I was hearing, this is what I learnt: that, to produce milk, cows need to give birth and their calves need to be taken away immediately. There’s more to it as we’ll see but that alone stopped me in my tracks. “I know what it means to love like a mother,” I thought. “Why would I inflict this on another mother - whatever the species - just so I can have another wedge of brie?” To paraphrase Kate Moss, nothing tastes as shit as cruelty feels.
If you didn’t know about cow-calf separation, don’t beat yourself up. In a YouGov survey commissioned by Animal Justice Project (AJP), 83% of those interviewed didn’t know either. “In 2025, it is absurd that most people still don’t realise that, just like humans, cows must be pregnant to lactate,’ says AJP’s founder and director Claire Palmer. ‘But it’s also no surprise, given the systematic disinformation the dairy industry has spread for decades.’
This disinformation isn’t just intentional; it’s also cultural. From insemination to slaughter, milk production hardly makes for lively after-dinner chit chat. Until recently, a friend whose actual relative is a dairy farmer would have counted himself amongst that 83%. But still, for such a commonplace act, the scale of ignorance is mindblowing. Around the world, 270 million dairy cows pump out a total of 600 million tonnes of milk a year. With about 23 million cows, the European Union is the largest milk producer followed by 10 million in North America and over 6 million in Australia and New Zealand. Milk production is also on the increase in South-East Asia, including countries not traditionally noted for milk consumption, such as China, which now has over 12 million cows producing milk. And, just to get back to where we started, every single cow loses every single one of her children. Please don’t let anyone tell you they don’t feel anything. At certain times of the year, the hills are alive with the sound of mothers calling helplessly for their newborns.
The Arlaming Reality of Dairy
So it’s been with relief and gratitude that I’ve seen advocates turn their attention to dairy this spring. VIVA’s minute-long cinema ad speaks directly to those ideas of motherhood (“You can’t keep your baby because we want your milk …” a ghoulish figure tells the woman). After showing across Channel 4, More 4 and Sky TV, with 10 million viewers, Animal Aid’s anti-dairy advert hit another 20 million viewers in cinemas. It’s a lean portrayal of typical housing conditions for dairy cows and the isolation of calves once they’ve been separated from mum. The caption: “If they could tell you, would you listen?”
Meanwhile, AJP released footage from a gruelling undercover investigation at Lowfields Farm in North Yorkshire. In ‘The Arlaming Reality of Dairy’, viewers see cows beaten with pipes and pliers; their swollen udders punched and hit. Mothers and their calves are savagely kicked moments after birth; dead babies - because they really don’t do well without mum - are left on concrete floors. Lame animals, in particular, are targets. “One severely injured cow, visibly emaciated and struggling to walk, faced callous treatment,” writes AJP in a post. “Despite her evident distress, she was shocked with the goad 40 times because her injuries prevented her from climbing the steep ramp into the slaughter truck. With no escape, she was driven up the ramp, limping and in agonising pain.” Throughout the film, the animals appear numb and shaken; bewildered by the way violence seems to come out of nowhere. If the eight minute film feels like an eternity to watch, imagine what it’s like for the animals.
Lowfields is a zero-grazing mega dairy that sells milk to Arla Foods, the UK’s largest producer of dairy products. Arla, in turn, supplies supermarkets such as Tesco, Morrisons, Asda and Aldi, as well as Starbucks. There are over 2,400 cows at the ‘farm’, producing 273,000 litres of milk a week. Notably, Lowfields is also Red Tractor-assured, a farmers-initiated certification that has itself come under fire for welfare issues. The point is this: if there was any dairy farm that you’d expect to be monitored within an inch of its operations, Lowfields is the one. It is well-known, high profile, trusted by global suppliers and their consumers. The fact that it’s the site of such quotidian horror means that the cruelty is not just the result of ‘bad apples’; it is everyday practice.
Workers were filmed kicking the cows’ sensitive udders. Picture: Animal Justice Project.
“It's routine. It’s systemic. It's shameful,” posted AJP’s campaign manager, Ayrton Cooper. “What we do to animals will never fail to shock me. This is the 22nd investigation we've launched at Animal Justice Project; each and every one brings forward something new and disturbing that will stick with me. A new sadistic way that humans are harming our fellow animals. A new reason why it all must be ended.” From The Daily Mail to the Northern Echo, media coverage of the film has been widespread. After its release, North Yorkshire Police and the local authority confirmed they were investigating the farm. Arla has since suspended the farmer, calling the abuse "completely unacceptable".
It’s great news - but it’s impossible to rest on laurels. Dairy has been ‘exposed’ before and the industry (and animal agriculture in general, to be frank) has a way of closing ranks. The truth is, we’re still generations away from tangible change. Walk down any supermarket aisle, glance down any cafe menu, flick through any cookbook and meat, milk, cream, cheese, lard and/or butter are all over the map. Milk proteins appear in the most unlikely of places, such as flavoured crisps. Gelatine is sometimes used as a binding agent in toilet paper. The bodies of cows and their children are simultaneously everywhere and nowhere, present and absent; their suffering turned into product. And that’s just how the industry likes it.
How did we get here, to this terrible place of unsupervised mega dairies, exhausted farmers and brutalised mothers? The world wars - and the very real need to feed populations during times of hardship - sit at the root of most of the ills of modern farming: driving mechanization, ripping up natural landscapes and increasing chemical use to maximize food production. The problem is, it’s all gone a bit too far. In 1933, the average herd size was about 14 cows (1). Today, the largest dairy farm in the world, with 105,000 cows, is Almarai, a Saudi Arabian dairy company, which produces 1.47 million metric tons of raw milk a year, comparable to the milk production of Indonesia or Norway.
A catalogue of injustices
Lowfields is an entry point to the issues around standard practice in the industry. Brace yourself. Removed calves are routinely shot if they’re male or reared as future dairy cows if female, continuing the cycle of despair. When vegan influencer Jamie Logan visited an Indian dairy with Mercy for Animals, she photographed herself alongside the decapitated head of a calf. It’s a common trick used to deceive grieving mothers into continuing to produce milk; heart breaking scenes show mothers standing protectively over the stuffed, treated skins of their babies, or ‘kahl bachas’, who have actually been killed weeks earlier. Google ‘suckling preventer’ and you’ll find all sorts of spiked masks for calves. Designed to ‘assist in weaning’, they make sure that every time a calf goes to suckle from mum, he’ll effectively prod her in her side, causing her to rear away.
The 21st century cow’s body produces three times more than her late 1930s counterpart, meaning that, by the time she reaches the slaughterhouse, her body is so exhausted that she is only useful to the industry as dog food or mince. Most dairy cows are youngsters themselves, killed at the age of 5, a fraction of their potential lifespan of 25. Finally, research has shown that, every year, in the UK, up to 150,000 dairy cows are slaughtered while still pregnant, mainly to maintain productivity. Activists often say we are at war with the world’s animals. What dairy shows us is that we are at war, even with those who are completely under our control.
Perhaps the exploitation might end if we knew cows better? Cows are courageous: when six young bullocks escaped a slaughterhouse in St Louis in 2016, their leader Chico protected his brothers, facing down the police. They are canny: when Emily the cow escaped, she impressed everyone so much with her ingenuity at hiding that People magazine dubbed her the ‘bovine Pimpernel’. They are playful: there are endless reels of cows, headbutting footballs back to carers. They are intuitive: when a cow, safe at last, gave birth in a Spanish sanctuary, she covered her rescuer’s face in licks and kisses. She died soon after, leading the sanctuary to believe that she was deliberately passing over the stewardship of her calf. They are compassionate: after being rescued, Justice was for many years the official welcoming committee at the Peaceful Prairie Sanctuary, making sure new rescues - of all species - knew they were safe.
And they are loving: on meeting a cow in a butcher's shop in an Egyptian beach town in 2021, Brooke Barney was struck by her “quiet affection, despite horrific circumstances.” The cow, Hazel, was killed and eaten but Barney later moved to Egypt to help more cows. “[Hazel’s] story saved future animals, but meeting her and spending time with her forever changed the way I exist in this world,” she writes. “The love, kindness, and forgiveness she gave me still bring me to tears when I think about them.” Cows who escape often become celebrated figures; a bronze statue of Emily stands at Peace Abbey alongside those of Mother Teresa and Mahatma Gandhi. Yet billions of similar acts of generosity and courage by cows, by pigs, by chickens that take place every day in the dark and the cold are simply erased by the churn of industrial agriculture. To see how loved Chico, Emily, Justice and Hazel were is to understand how much we lose in that erasure. “If love could have saved you, you’d still be here,” Barney writes.
A spiked nose ring irritates a mother's sensitive udders and prevents a calf from being able to suckle. State of Israel, 2018. Jo-Anne McArthur / We Animals
Given the way dairy is embedded into so many social norms, change is hard to imagine. There are people in my own life who I’d desperately love to read this article but who never will. Then, in an awful irony, in a world lurching towards the political right, there is the politicisation of meat. According to a 2018 Gallup poll, American liberals were 5.5 times more likely to be vegetarian compared to conservatives. Why? Not apparently because they adore the taste of animals but “because doing so supports dominance ideologies and resistance to cultural change” (2). Add increasing associations between milk and white masculinity to the pot and you’ve got quite the toxic brew there. In one of his YouTube videos, neo-Nazi commentator James Allsup suggested that what epitomises the anti-fascist, feminist, politically correct people he lambasts is that they drink soy instead of cow milk.
It’s still not entirely clear what’s manly about chugging someone else’s mum’s milk but maybe that’s the point: the utter subjugation of a female body. For Women’s History Month, animal groups took the chance to show the links between the exploitation of women and that of animals. A punchy post by the Animal Save Movement at the time offered a quote by Lisa Kemmerer: “The patriarchy that oppresses women oppresses nonhuman animals. Farmed animals and ‘housewives’, ‘lab’ animals and [sex workers], dancing bears and girls in the sex trade - all have too long been exploited by the same patriarchal hierachy, wherein the comparatively weak are exploited for the benefit of the powerful.” The post goes on to explore how animal bodies are used to normalize rape culture; the correlation between violence to women and children and violence to animals; how spheres of oppression overlap.
It includes a quote by Carol J Adams, author of The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory: “Dominance functions best in a culture of disconnections and fragmentation. Feminism recognises connections. Imagine.” Adams is a leading proponent of eco-feminism, a dynamic political theory that identifies how oppressions are interconnected. Her interest in women’s rights, animal rights and the rights of nature - and the intersections between them - feels more resonant and more urgent than ever.
Hope in action: witnessing and compassion
What to do? In 2012, researcher Kathyn Gillespie visited a livestock auction for her paper Witnessing Animal Others: Bearing Witness, Grief and the Political Function of Emotion. The experience showed an erasure so complete that, even with the suffering bang in front of them, the crowd saw nothing amiss. “The audience was filled with buyers and spectators talking cheerfully about the animals, prices, their farms and families,” writes Gillespie. “For humans who farm and are in the animal product industry, the auction is a jovial place where they can come together for some lighthearted banter and a meal in the auction canteen. The auction is not scripted as a place of human or animal grief. Animals’ lives and bodies in this space are thoroughly commodified, their suffering illegible to the accustomed observer, the violence against them made mundane through its regularity.“ (3)
For Gillespie, her response - her hope in action - is the dynamic act of witnessing. “In acknowledging my own emotional response of grief in this space, I began to think about the role of emotion in witnessing. To mourn the animal - the calf smacked in the face with a paddle, the cow and calf calling to each other as they are loaded into different transport trailers, the worn-out cow used for dairy unable to rise from the ground - reflected a subversive act in a place where the animal was thoroughly ungrieved and abstracted.”
For American philosopher and Adams’ collaborator in eco-feminism Lori Gruen, hope in action is understanding that “compassion is crucial to undoing oppression in both theory and practice.” (80) And yes, that means rejecting the industries based on that oppression. “In their everyday practice, vegetarians and vegans live resistance,” she writes in her seminal 1993 article Dismantling Oppression: An Analysis of the Connection between Women and Animals. “They simply do not contribute to the suffering of animals and the perpetuation of a system of oppression … By refusing to consume the products of pain (not eating animals, not wearing leather, fur, and feathers, not using makeup and household products that have been tested on animals), feminists, like animal liberationists can directly deny the legitimacy of a patriarchal system that treats sentient individuals as objects to use and profit from.” (83)
The campaigns by VIVA, Animal Aid and AJP are having an impact; activists and sanctuaries around the world are doing their best to rescue whoever they can. Academics such as Gillespie, Adams and Gruen are challenging worldviews. Activism, in all its different forms, works, telling the truths no one wants to hear, despite attracting often vitriolic pushback. Like I said, I became vegan when my daughter was seven. Body and soul, it’s the best decision I ever made, allowing me to live in alignment with my deepest held beliefs. If anyone asks me why (and no one ever does), this is what I’d like to say: I’m vegan because I reject all forms of erasure and domination. I’m vegan because animals are our kin, not our slaves. I’m vegan because I believe in the beauty of the natural world and all her beings. I’m vegan because I don’t believe people want to act against their better natures. I’m vegan because I stand in solidarity with all mothers. Remember the Mothers of Lowfields. Happy Mother’s Day.
Citations
Brightmaize, A Recent History Of Milk – Part II: The Milking Cow. Nov 8, 2023. https://www.brightmaize.com/a-recent-history-of-milk-part-ii-the-milking-cow/
Dhont, K, and Hudson, G. Why do right-wing adherents engage in more animal exploitation and meat consumption? Psychology Today, September 10, 2018. https://www.psychologytoday.com/gb/blog/without-prejudice/201809/meat-eating-and-political-ideology
Gillespie, K. Witnessing Animal Others, 2020. http://kathrynagillespie.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/Gillespie_Witnessing-Animal-Others.pdf
