What's wrong with using dairy products?

[Cranky]

There is a poster up at the food court at the hospital I work at - it is on a board that is supposed to provide nutritional information. It says "Women need three serves of dairy a day" or something like that, and every time I walk past it, I just want to tear it down. It makes my mad that something sponsored by dairy corporations would be hung up in a hospital as "nutritional information"!!!
:mad:

[PinkFluffyCloud]

I would have to sneak in and graffiti an extra line or two in addition to that message, Cranky! :D

[julieruble]

See The Horrors of Dairy (http://www.veganforum.com/forums/showthread.php?t=793) thread to see why dairy does harm animals.

[GwynneVeg]

Neither do I.. But why do people ("vegetarians") keep drinking milk etc? Most people think this article is a joke or something, and we need lots of calcium... I don't think so, but I don't know either. I just find what they're saying in the article very probable.

It's the millions of dollars spent each year by the dairy industry that keep people drinking milk. Honestly, people are brainwashed!

[GwynneVeg]

Well, the 'protein' isn't really the reason, it's a pH imbalance (although dairy and dead animals have all sorts of other negative health issues). The human digestive system can't deal with the acidic nature of dairy or dead animal flesh. It's not discussed often, but the human stomach and digestive system is only good at neutralizing plant acids, and the human body has a pH in line with other fruit and succulent vegetable consuming herbivores (7.4). When you eat a highly acidic diet like one with animal products, grains, and refined sugar, your body spends massive amounts of calcium trying to equalize your blood pH. This never really stops with people who consume dialy meals with animal products, so osteoporosis is a result. If you eat a highly acidic vegetarian diet (say tons of sugars and grains), then you will not only suffer a similar fate, but will also suffer from malnutrition like most dead animal eaters. Of course it's impossible to eat an alkaline cadaver and pus dominated diet, where it's really easy to eat an alkaline plant based diet.


Anyway...


I've heard that salt and soda and lots of proteins are causes of bone loss, but I've never heard about grains and refined sugar. Can you explain?

[Fruitbat]

I do not think there is any reason that humans should or can legitmise the drinking of milk BUT I thin fully skimmed milk is not unhealthy and is indeed a good source of protein BUT the milk industry has hyped it up into this amazing health product which it isnt. There are no health benefits that milk provides that cant be obtained from other sources and milk is not perfect for human consumption as it is designed for cows. Thus nutritionally as part of healthy and varied diet it does no harm but it should not be relied upon exclusively. The vegan alternatives are way healthier and whats more ethical and seldom lead to allergies...

[PinkFluffyCloud]

I think Cow's milk is unhealthy for anyone but a Cow!

[deadinside]

lol @ cowpie
I'm wondering the same thing too.

[PinkFluffyCloud]

See The Horrors of Dairy (http://www.veganforum.com/forums/showthread.php?t=793) thread to see why dairy does harm animals.

Doesn't that make *you* wanna go Vegan, then , Julie??????????? :rolleyes:

[Kiva Dancer]

I've heard that salt and soda and lots of proteins are causes of bone loss, but I've never heard about grains and refined sugar. Can you explain? It sounds to me like the acidic/alkaline diet he's talking about. It's a nice concept, but I'm not going to eat eggs or whey just because they're alkaline.

I posted this once before and I'll post it again. Here's (http://www.thewolfeclinic.com/acidalkfoods.html) a chart of acidic/alkaline foods incase anyone's interested.

[vegancrusaders]

I think that if one has a house, some land and a cow, and is and looking after that cow with love and protection (until that cow dies of a natural death) and the owner of the cow decides that he or she wants milk and is willing to look after the calf as well as the cow threw sickness and health then one should take some milk for his endeavor. The cows should not be treated like machines and killed at the age of 4. If you want milk then treat the cow like your mother and protect her tell she dies naturally. Don't take the cheap way out and buy dairy from the store. Produce milk from your own protected cow.
This is not a vegan diet , but a good start for vegetarians . Note to all vegetarians consider going conditional vegan (wich means to only have milk from protected cows. Because if one just gets dairy from the store then one is associated with the killing of that cow, as 100% of dairy cows are killed for beef). Im just saying that not all people are going to give up all milk and dairy products. A good step for all those who have gone vegetarian would be to only take milk from protected cows this is a great start. Other wise one should question why one is vegetarian.

[Kiva Dancer]

Cow's milk has no place in the vegan diet.

Or any diet for that matter.

[gertvegan]

I think that if one has a house, some land and a cow, and is and looking after that cow with love and protection (until that cow dies of a natural death) and the owner of the cow decides that he or she wants milk and is willing to look after the calf as well as the cow threw sickness and health then one should take some milk for his endeavor

If you want milk then treat the cow like your mother and protect her tell she dies naturally. Don't take the cheap way out and buy dairy from the store. Produce milk from your own protected cow.Its still exploitation vegancrusaders.


Follow the vegan diet.Don't you mean vegetarian diet ??

Why do I have that rescued hens eggs feeling

[Suzulan]

I did not visit this forum for least 2-3 months but today I checked message of Vegancrusaders, KivaDancer.
Yes, if people are calling themselves humane and civilized, these people have no business of keep eating dairy(and eggs of course).
If cows are kept as companion animal and calves are kept until they die from old age, I don't get too upset but there are very few people who have this kind of love and respect for farm animals.
You will never guess how I get angry with dairy eaters who are eating these products with or without knowing DIRTY SECRET OF DAIRY FARMS.
Sometimes I wish God is going to send special disease to all farm animals who were born as food animals and let these animals to die instantly without any suffering to escape this sickening hell called factory farms and horror of slaughterhouses!!!
People think mad cow disease is rare and there is no reason to fear but these people don't know about how other species of wild animals are getting different form of mad cow diseases.
Human form of mad cow disease is not called mad cow disease and many people who might have human form of mad cow disease are misdiagnosed.

People if you want other people to boycott dairy products, please display www.notmilk.com on your bumpersticker.
You will never guess how many people you can reach without much effort when every time you drive your car.

[mysh]

I wonder at times how to explain to an omni or a lacto-vegetarian what's so bad about consuming dairy. I understand the health aspects, but I want to go beyond that - I want to engender an understanding of why it would be wrong even if cow's milk were the healthiest thing in the world for humans to consume.

I also know all the arguments regarding how they are treated in the factory farms, but then I always get the story of "when I was young, I lived on/near/within 1000 miles of a farm, and the cows were all well treated, their calves weren't taken away, and they would be in pain if they weren't milked" (the latter is, of course, a whole other discussion). So I am left wondering, if all dairy farming went back to the way it used to be, and in fact still is in the Swiss Alps, for example, what is wrong with it? I understand the intrinsic wrongness, I just seem to have difficulties explaining them to other (seemingly) reasonable people.

So here are the arguments I have (though they all seem quite ineffective when talking to your average dairy consumer):


Cow's milk is for calves.
You are stealing that milk from the cow.
Keeping cows for their milk and taking it from them against their will is, technically, no different than slavery, and hence just as despicable.

The first two are not very likely to convince someone who's willing to kill both the cow and the calf anyway, and the last one normally just draws shocked expressions in a "how dare you compare the two!" kind of way.

Does anyone have any other arguments that might make sense to the prion-addled brain of an omni?

[vegetous]

You could try grossing them out by telling them about the puss and blood that is in milk.
- Matt

[mysh]

eh - that doesn't work for me. Despite their (obviously) limited mental capacities, I still like to treat them as adults.

[Kiva Dancer]

I'm pretty useless here. All I know are health reasons why humans shouldn't drink milk.

Sorry.

[Seaside]

At some point in every mammal's life they've got to stop hanging onto the mother's teat and grow up. Maybe you should ask them if they know what it means to be WEANED!!! Familiarize yourself with the psychological problems that are associated with children who refuse to be weaned, and discuss this with them. There are no animals except us who cannot face being turned away from the breast and tossed out to fend for themselves. Ask them if they've heard of any adult animal besides us that goes straight from its mother's milk to that of another species when its mother has dried up. Just because someone else is doing all the work doesn't mean that people who drink animal milk aren't symbolically sucking the teats themselves. Just tell them its about time they grew up and got themselves weaned! :D

[snivelingchild]

Well, if all farms returned to traditional methods of farming, tem cows would produce just the right amount of milk for their calf. This would make taking any of it letting a calf go hungry, unless you replaced it with milk replacers which are very unhealthy for them and this would make you be putting your own "needs" before their real ones. Also, (pretending that veal doesn't exist) talk about what would happen to the male cows that are born (since milk breeds are completely different from meat breeds) and the dairy cows after they produce milk. I also tend to find that a better way of putting that third point is to refer to it as blatant exploitation of a creature that cannot defend themself, and avoid using the term slavery. Another point is that dairy cows must be impregnated every year to give milk, which is more than normal and natural and is far worse for their health than letting them live their lives naturally, plus, since milk requires adding more life, that is just exponentially expanding the resources required for milk-yielding, thus making the environmental impact even greater thn just keeping the cows themselves.

And has anyone actually ever told you that BOTH the calves weren't taken away and that they would be in pain if not milked, because how would they not be milked if their calves were there?

[Imapeach]

Ask them if they would drink the milk of a rat? Or a horse? How bout a pig or a cat?

My sister was telling me about a story she heard on the news about how a litter of kittens had been mothered by a female dog, drinking her milk to survive and whatnot. My 8 year old neice piped up "Eeewwwww!!! That's so gross!" But how is that any different to what humans do? Really, it's not even a matter of survival for us!

I think on some level most people know it's utterly ridiculous. I recall thinking how strange it was when i was still omni or ovo-lacto. It's just habit really.

[sophia]

oops!!

[sophia]

[QUOTE=Imapeach]Ask them if they would drink the milk of a rat? Or a horse? How bout a pig or a cat?

I know what you mean. Everyone is so obsessed with milk.. calcium, etc. They forget it is from another species.That is so biologicallly incorrect, no wonder there are so many allergies. Calfes and cows have four stomachs, we have one. What the hell are we doing drinking it? Who thought of it.
I used to work with a lady who brestfed her daughter till she was five. Everyone thought that was gross and wrong. I personally think drinking another species milk is distgusting, and told them and they were like oh yeah when you think of it like that. Do these people ever think?

[mysh]

Seaside - that is an excellent suggestion!

Sniveling Child - You make some good points there. The problem is in discussing this with my mother (as the worst example), who used to go into the Swiss Alps in her childhood and hang around the milk farms. They let the cows go out into the fields, with their calves, and the farmer comes out and milks the cows of their "excess" milk. As anyone who has ever breastfed knows, you produce as much milk as is needed, so if you have to feed two babies you'll be producing more than if you only had to feed one, and as you wean your child(ren), you start to produce less. So, in fact, the cow can easily produce more than just one calf needs, meaning you are no longer stealing anything from the calf. Oh, and these calves in the Alps (for the most part) don't get taken away for veal, but get to grow up in their herd, until they're either the ones producing the milk, or mating with the milk producers to make new calves. In other words, if they were sentient and able to consent to the excess milk being taken (as some human mothers do to help feed babies whose own mother cannot produce any or enough milk), there would be nothing ethically wrong with it (though it would still be nutritionally inappropriate).

So that's the scenario where the only remaining argument is the exploitation. The problem there is that we as a society have become so used to people being exploited in the workplace that some small amount of exploiting animals seems negligible. (And you're right, describing it as "exploitation" rather than equating it to slavery would be easier to swallow).

Cows also don't have to be impregnated every year to continue giving milk - just like human mothers can breastfeed as long as the child needs it (as long as the hormones are right). In some places the grandmother of a baby will help breast-feed the baby, so even without having been pregnant, she can still produce the milk, simply through hormonal stimulation caused by being close to the breastfeeding mother and being needed.

As I mentioned before, the "cows being in pain if not milked" thing is a whole other discussion. That's a very true statement - of the dairy cows in modern-day factory farms. They are bred to produce truly excessive amounts of milk, and are given other chemicals to stimulate the milk production, so I have no difficulties at all believing that it must be agonising for them to carry around a lot more milk than nature ever intended for them to carry. The solution to that problem, however, is NOT milking them, but rather not breeding them that way and not pumping them full of chemicals. Then the problem would fix itself in a few generations, at most.

[Astrocat]

I still like to treat them as adults.
If they are grown adults, I am sure that they don;t need to have information kept from them as if they are children. This would include telling them about the reality of milk, should you feel a need to.
Disgust is as viable a reason as any other which you might have to find it 'bad' to consume milk.

The people who you mentioned appear to be rationalising the unethical in order to avoid facing, never mind accepting, the truth.
There is usually little way in which you yourself can change the mind of someone who is actively in denial, in order to try and make them face the truth.
That is just how self-delusion works - especially when it is reinforced by repetitive conditioning and widely held societal misconception or belief.

Your mother, i am sure, does surely realise that she no longer lives in the Alps, and does not get milk from singing smiley happy cows.

People who use a "best possible scenario" to try and justify or rationalise their own substantially more cruelly founded and unethical scenario and lifestyle have their mind closed to reality, or at least have their blinkers on in order to maintain their tunnel-vision.

I gave up trying to change these kinds of closed-minded peoples' minds long ago.
Life is much better now.

Oh, you might want to point out to them though - that pasteurised milk, which is 99.9999999% likely to be the sort which they are buying, is very capable indeed of killing a healthy calf within 90 days or less, as this process is such a perversion from nature.