Blog written by Victoria Smith, volunteer blog writer

With Animal Justice Project’s Starbucks Week of Action taking place across the UK, here are some reminders of the reasons why we should all be choosing plant milks over dairy. 

The Dairy Industry Lies to You

Dairy is a byword for an array of abuse and suffering. As illustrated by the recent AJP investigation at Lowfields Farm, even in so-called ‘high-welfare’ operations, bad practice is rife. At the Red Tractor Assured Lowfields Farm, undercover footage shows cows – some just babies – being kicked, slapped and beaten by workers.

The marketing of dairy is a masterclass in welfare-washing. Far from spending their days grazing on lush pastures in the sunshine, dairy cows on zero-grazing farms such as Lowfields never get to go outside. Instead they are stuck inside vast, unsanitary, sheds with unnatural light and thousands of other cows. This is far from the fictitious image that industry giants like Arla create.

Animal Rights

Our entire ability to consume dairy rests on the exploitation of bodies that are not our own. Female cows are forcibly impregnated, and after carrying their babies for 9 months, are separated from them within 24 hours of giving birth. They’re then hooked up to a machine that will drain them of the milk they’ve produced for their babies. 

Thanks to generations of selective breeding, dairy cows produce far more milk than is natural, and only being milked twice a day, have up to 20 litres accumulating in their udders at any one time, causing huge discomfort. They struggle to hold themselves upright and often have their back legs shackled together to prevent them sliding out sideways underneath them. They suffer with lameness and a painful infection in their udders called mastitis, which is so prevalent that there are specific rules in place for just how many pus cells are allowed in milk before it’s considered unfit for human consumption. (It’s 400,000,000 pus cells per litre).

Cows will be forced through this milking cycle until their supply runs dry, at which point they’ll be impregnated again – for another whole round of discomfort and suffering. This will happen several times, until their broken bodies are not considered profitable anymore, at which point they’ll be sent off to slaughter, at a fraction of their natural lifespan.

Let’s not forget the other victims of this process - the living, breathing individuals that are essentially born as byproducts of this production cycle. Male calves will typically be sold off into the veal market, or shot at a few days old, since the only purpose they served was to stimulate their mother’s milk production. Females will be housed alone, away from their mothers, and fed a milk replacer. When they’re around 18 months old, they themselves will be forcibly impregnated, and so the cycle repeats itself.

The Environment

Rejecting dairy milk doesn’t mean giving up your favourites, either. There are so many alternatives that mean you can still enjoy your tea, your coffee and your cereal, minus the violence. And as a bonus, you’d be doing the environment a favour too, as dairy farming doesn’t just hurt cows, it also hurts the planet. 

The chart below, taken from a  2018 Oxford University-led study on the environmental impact of different foods, highlights the huge difference in land use, greenhouse gas emissions, water use, and eutrophication, of dairy milk vs the most popular plant milks.

Per litre of milk, the production of dairy uses around 10 times as much land, causes 3 times the greenhouse gas emissions, and both uses and pollutes water to a much greater degree. I’m sure we can all agree that using 628 litres of water to produce one litre of milk, as we hurtle ever nearer to widespread water shortages doesn’t seem a great payoff. 

Health

The good news is that you don’t have to play a part of this, because – and this is a wild fact – humans don’t actually need the baby-food of another species to survive! One might even argue that consuming the liquid nature designed to grow a 600kg bovine with a completely different stomach structure to us might explain why so many people have issues when it comes to digesting dairy – but hey, that’s a whole other topic!

Plant milks also contain less saturated fat, calories and cholesterol than dairy. If you’re worried you’re missing out on good stuff, many brands are fortified with calcium and various vitamins to make them even healthier. 

There are so many plant milks to choose from: 

• Oat milk (the coffee favourite…urge Starbucks to make the change!)
• Coconut milk (the hot chocolate favourite) 
• Soya milk (the tea favourite / great for cooking / best for protein)
• Rice milk (low-fat favourite)
• Hemp milk
• Almond milk
• Hazelnut milk
• Cashew milk
• Pea milk (surprisingly tasty)
• Potato milk (Ok quite weird…but now weirder than the breast milk of another species!)

Basically, it seems that we can milk many things! But only the milk from animals comes from a place where agonised mothers cried out for their dead babies. So why not give some of these alternatives a try, pick your favourite, and make the switch to a milk where no-one had to suffer. 

As always

For the Animals.