chapter seven THE DOMINATION OF THE FEMININE

“Can one regard a fellow creature as a property item, an investment, a piece of meat, an ‘it,’ without degenerating into cruelty towards that creature?” - Karen Davis1

“Milk was destined to feed the animal’s offspring and not that man should take it with force for himself. The kid has the right to enjoy its mother’s milk and its mother’s love, but hard-hearted man, influenced by his materialistic and shallow outlook, changes and perverts these true functions. Thus the gentle kid is unable to partake of its mother’s love and rejoice in the splendor of life.” - Rabbi Abraham Kook, Chief Rabbi of Israel, 1865.1935

“The wrong done another reacts most heavily against one’s self.”2 - Mary Baker Eddy

The Dairy Nightmare

There are two other large categories of animal products that we eat even though they are not food for humans: dairy products and eggs. Many people who take a close look at dairy and egg operations say that they are in some ways more toxic and cruel than those dealing only with the flesh of animals, because the cows and chickens are severely abused for longer periods and inevitably slaughtered when their productivity declines.

Dairy products, to begin with, constitute an exceedingly large and complex topic. The enslavement of the female dairy cow has contributed to the enslavement of humans in a range of ways, so the damage caused by this practice extends far beyond the negative physical effects of consuming milk. Though many of us stop eating dairy products just for health reasons, it’s important to see the larger context of the ongoing tragedy, for this truth is as old as time: we cannot sow seeds of slavery and cruelty and reap the fruit of freedom and health.

Fundamentally, cow’s milk is a substance designed by nature for baby cows, not for humans. We are the only species that drinks the milk intended for the young of other species, and we are the only species that insists on drinking milk beyond the time of weaning. It seems we cannot bear the thought of growing up and leaving home. Perhaps we long for infancy and the peaceful oblivion of our mother’s breast, and if hers isn’t available, then we’ll use the breast of any lactating mother, even if she’s a cow and we have to kill her babies to get to it. Just as the complete unnaturalness of humans killing and eating animals is obvious if we contemplate trying to do it without implements, so is the drinking of milk. The easy availability of veal cutlets and cheap hamburger masks their true cost and the cruelty of their dairy-farm origin, as do the tidy packages of cheese, milk, cream, and butter in the refrigerated dairy sections.

In the wild, it is doubtful we’d ever be able to get close enough to a lactating cow, in a forest or grassland somewhere in Asia where cows naturally live, to obtain any milk. Wild bulls are ferociously protective and would gore us or chase us off first. If we managed to get by the bulls, it is unlikely any cow would allow us to get under her and suck on her teats. We would have to compete with the cow’s own baby, the rightful recipient of her milk, and push or kick the calf away, and somehow get the mother to hold still for us while we sucked or squeezed on her teats. The whole image is so absurd that not even the most committed milk-bibber would ever contemplate attempting it.

It is only through an ongoing tradition of vicious domination that humans can drink cows’ milk, an unhealthy and perverse action at its core. The dairy products in our grocery stores are the result of many centuries of human manipulation and horrific brutality against cows. a brutality epitomized by today’s mechanized dairy operations, both large and small.

Pushing Cows to Produce

Cows today are forced to produce a far greater quantity of milk than they ever would in the wild. This is accomplished through two types of manipulation - of food and of hormones.3 In the wild, a cow, like all mammals, will produce milk after giving birth to a baby, and does so in a classic bell curve for about seven months, beginning at less than ten pounds of milk per day, climaxing at about twenty-five pounds per day, and then tapering back to ten pounds and then to zero as the calf begins to eat solid food. On today’s dairies the newborn calf is immediately removed from the mother, causing enormous anguish to both, and the mother is artificially forced to produce from 90 to 110 pounds of milk per day for a full seven to eight months. Dairy cows are impregnated at a much younger age than would ever occur in the wild, and are kept pregnant virtually continuously, even while they are lactating from the previous pregnancy. The enormous strain of being pushed so hard to produce such abnormally large quantities of milk quickly destroys the health of these cows. Though they would naturally live twenty-five years in the wild, after about four years of this dairy abuse their “productivity” drops off. They are then forced to endure the brutality of the slaughterhouse and be reduced to inexpensive hamburger meat, leather, and animal feed.

The enormous and continuous abuse to which dairy cow mothers are subjected makes their milk extremely unhealthy for humans. Besides the naturally occurring human toxins in cows’ milk, like IGF-1 growth factor, casein, estrogen, soporific hormones, lactase, pus, bacteria, parasites, and the apparently addictive casomorphins discussed in Chapter 4, there are the toxins that are a direct result of pushing the cows so hard: artificially introduced growth hormones, milk-increasing hormones, antibiotics, tranquilizers, and feeds high in pesticide residues. So-called organic milk may contain smaller quantities of the artificial toxins, but not of the natural ones, whose presence in cow’s milk reminds us that this is a food that is designed for calves, not for humans.

How are the mother cows actually pushed to produce such gigantic volumes of milk? They are forced to eat cholesterol in their feed and are injected with a blend of hormones, including estrogen, progesterone, prolactin, and testosterone. Dairy consumers receive little protection from these hormones, since regulations on using them are minimal. As Mason and Singer demonstrate in Animal Factories, the Food and Drug Administration and the Department of Agriculture exist to serve and protect agribusiness interests rather than consumer, environmental, or animal interests.4 As but one example, while Canada and all European governments banned the use of rBGH, Monsanto’s controversial, genetically engineered, milk-increasing recombinant bovine growth hormone, the FDA dutifully approved it in 1985. It has been used on dairies in this country ever since, despite scientific evidence that it may increase cancer risks in both consumers and cows.5

Dairy farmers also discovered long ago that if cows were fed cholesterol-rich foods, they would give a lot more milk. Of course, an adult cow in the wild is a complete herbivore and would never eat animal flesh, milk, or eggs (the only sources of cholesterol, which is absent in all plant foods). But dairy cows, like many other farmed animals enduring the debasement of modern industrialized agriculture, are given feed “enriched” with animal flesh and offal, by-products from the slaughter of fish, birds, and other mammals, including perhaps other cows and even their own calves. It is all unspeakably perverse, yet it has been standard procedure on dairy operations for years. According to former dairyman Tom Rodgers, even the smaller dairy operations feed their cows “enriched” feed to boost output so they can compete economically.6

Because each dairy cow is forced to produce far more calves than can be used on the dairy, her calves are immediately slaughtered, auctioned to veal operations, or auctioned to build beef herds and killed at one to two years of age. In all these cases, parts of their bodies will end up at the rendering plant, mixed with the offal and unusable body parts of fish, pigs, poultry, road kill, laboratory animals, and euthanized dogs, cats, horses, and other animals, and then cooked, ground up, and added to corn, wheat, soybeans, and other grains to be fed back to the cows. Cows have thus been routinely forced to eat other cows, and quite possibly the flesh and organs of their own young, in their “enriched” feed. The only reason this may now be stopping is the outbreak of mad cow disease, a direct result of such mad agricultural practices. Although the FDA’s ban on feeding the flesh of ruminants to ruminants has reduced the likelihood of cows eating other cows, they are still fed pigs, chickens, turkeys, fish, dogs, and other animals. Considering the reputedly lax enforcement and inspection of this FDA policy, some are likely still forced into cannibalism.

This bizarre and outrageous cruelty lurks behind every milk mustache. It is considered business as usual, and no one has questioned it because the animals involved have been reduced to mere objects by the dairy industry, with the sole overriding goal of producing the most milk at the lowest price. (And with the USDA guaranteeing to buy milk surpluses, the industry maximizes production.7) This whole industry is obviously both a result of.and a contributor to.a severely reduced cultural intelligence that has lost its ability to make basic connections.

The Toxins in Milk

As discussed earlier, ingested chemicals, pesticides, fungicides, fertilizers, and heavy metals accumulate in body tissues, especially in the fatty tissues and organs. Dairy cows thus concentrate not only the toxins that are sprayed on the grains and hay they eat, but also the more concentrated toxins that have accumulated in the rendered body parts of the animals they are forced to eat as well. All this accumulates in their milk, because milk is high in fat and toxins ride in fat. Dairy products, particularly butter, cheese, cream, and ice cream, are clearly unhealthy and dangerous to eat, especially for children and pregnant or nursing women.

Besides all this, there are potent naturally occurring toxins in milk. Nature never intended us to drink milk intended for the offspring of another species, particularly cows. Cow’s milk is specifically suited to the nutritional needs of herd animals who double their weight in only forty-seven days, weigh three hundred pounds within fourteen weeks, and grow four healthy stomachs! Cow’s milk contains three times as much protein as human milk and about fifty percent more fat. Dog’s milk, for example, is nutritionally much more similar to human milk than cow’s milk. Cow’s milk is far too coarse, especially for young children who are growing delicate brain, nervous system, and other tissues. Human children are not calves! Infant brain and nerve tissue are best grown with the nutrients in human milk. The main protein in human milk, lactalbumin, has a molecular weight of 14K. It is perfectly suited to building sensitive human tissue. The basic protein in cow’s milk, casein, has a molecular weight of 233K8 and, because it is so durable and sticky, is used as a binder in paint, and as the glue that holds plywood together and sticks labels to bottles.9 It is perfect for building a calf’s tissues but causes incalculable harm to humans. Casein is an immense and unwieldy protein, difficult for a human child (or adult for that matter) to properly break down, creating a lot of acidic residue when metabolized, and in the case of young children, causing many serious problems.

We are concerned not only about the host of childhood symptoms that have been linked with dairy products, including colic, earaches, sore throats, colds, fevers, anemia, diabetes, tonsillitis, appendicitis, allergies of various kinds, inflamed mucus membranes, diarrhea, gas, and cramps.10 We are also concerned about the damage done to the early development of tissues of young children who are forced to eat and drink dairy products. Can the sensitive human tissues that make up the young child’s mind-body system possibly be properly formed with the gluey and cumbersome casein and excess fat that are meant for growing young bovines? It’s like trying to create a delicate landscape painting with house-painting brushes as tools! This may certainly affect the early psychological development of our children.and with the bovine hormones, toxins, and misery in milk, one of the effects may very well be a basic desensitization of the child. How tragic to pollute and damage the miraculously sensitive human vehicle at an early age, reducing its ability to be a conduit for spiritual energy, wisdom, and compassion, and perhaps diminishing its ability to sense the subtle interconnectedness that it is created to perceive, explore, and celebrate. To continue to eat dairy products into adolescence and adulthood compounds and reinforces the tragedy.

At a deeper level, forcing young children to eat dairy products brings into their impressionable minds and bodies a most unfortunate and terrible vibrational energy of the profound sadness, grief, panic, suffering, and fear that mother cows always experience on dairies, organic or not. The whole dairy business is founded upon stealing: forcibly stealing calves from their mothers and mother’s milk from calves. We have become desensitized to just how cruel this actually is, and how it underlies, perhaps in large measure, our culture’s basic repression, confinement, and exploitation of the female and the feminine principle.

The mothers of all mammals feel terrible emotional stress if their newborn offspring are endangered and will do everything in their power to protect them. Human mothers know how deep this feeling is, and how devastating it would be to have their children taken from them. Mother love will often give its own life for its child. We can see this deep maternal caring in dogs, bears, elephants, monkeys, deer, lions, whales: in all mammals it is a defining and obvious characteristic of mothers. For scientists, agribusinessmen, or theologians to deny this, or discount its importance, only shows how reduced their intelligence and sensitivity have become through their cultural woundedness and consequent skill in disconnecting.

Of all the mammals, it is the cow whose maternal instinct has been perhaps the most obvious and celebrated: her gentle and patient eyes, her natural mothering way with her calf, licking and feeding and watching over her baby, and her loud lamenting when the calf is taken from her. She cannot fight the hands that steal her offspring away, or speak to us in human words, telling us how deeply it hurts her. But it is obvious to anyone with eyes to see and ears to hear. For us to ignore her suffering, and the suffering of her calf.hundreds, thousands, millions of times over.is to ignore and deny our own decency. There is a deep and terrible transgression in this, the unnatural coveting of the calf’s mother’s milk several thousand years ago, and the building of a whole culture around the stealing of milk, the killing of the mother and her children, and justifying the whole horrific thing by mythologizing it: the Lord promising us the land of milk and honey. This violent theft of milk from enslaved mothers planted seeds of war and exploitation that are tragically almost completely invisible. Today, our culture takes milk for granted! It is aggressively promoted around the world. How can we ever hope for peace when we practice such shameful violence on such a massive scale?

Four Pathways to Hell

The calves taken from their mothers are always destined for brutal mistreatment, and the mother cow certainly has an awareness of this. Animals are remarkably sensitive, as countless cultures have recognized and as scientific evidence is increasingly showing. Mother cows are aware that the hands that confine and rape her and push her so hard for her milk cannot mean well for her children. The dairy-born calf will go down one of four doomed pathways.

If she is a female, she may be raised to be, like her mother, a slave in the dairy. She will be removed from her mother as early as possible so as not to waste the mother’s marketable milk. She will be dehorned, usually by the use of a red-hot electric iron applied to her horn buttons. This is described in a modern dairy management textbook:

. . . lay the calf on its side and put your knee on the neck. . . . The dehorner has to be left on the button for approximately five to twenty seconds. The time will seem longer, because of the combined unpleasantness of burning hair and a struggling calf . . . dehorning may be complete . . . when you hear a squeaking sound as the dehorner is twisted. It is the sound of the dehorner tip rubbing against the bone of the skull.11

According to the dairy industry, about half the calves are born with “too many” teats on their udders, and these extra teats, which are “unsightly” and may interfere with the electric milking machines, are also removed from the calves with no anesthetic, as described again in the dairy management textbook: “Grasp the teat between your thumb and forefinger. Even in small calves, the nerve supply to their teats is well developed. Make sure the calf is well restrained before you proceed. Pull the teat outwards and take a generous bite with the scissors.”12 Dehorning, tail docking, and teat removal not only cause intense pain but also increase the risk of infection and thus the spread of disease. They help account for the widespread problem of Bovine Leukemia Virus, which infects cows in an estimated eighty-nine percent of U.S. dairies13 and, according to researchers at the University of California, may pose a cancer threat to consumers.14

Whereas in the wild a heifer would not be ready to have her first calf for at least three to five years, that is far too long to feed her without getting milk money from her. Cow feed is expensive, so operators want to get her into production quickly, which means getting her pregnant as soon as possible, in just a year or less, when she is still a mere child in human terms. This is accomplished through hormone manipulation, administering excessive amounts of estrogen and other hormones, as well as prostaglandin, a hormone that is used to bring cows into heat when dairy operators want to have them inseminated. In the vast majority of cases, the dairy cow will be confined to a stall or milking paddock year-round, often exposed to extreme temperatures, with nothing to do but eat and stand in one place, reduced to the status of a milk-producing machine. She will be inseminated by a sperm gun shoved elbow-deep into her vagina and fired. The sperm comes from a special bull who also exists to be milked.for his sperm.and will be slaughtered when his productivity declines.

As soon as she gives birth, the cow’s baby will be quickly stolen from her, and she will be milked two to three times per day by the milking machines. No longer something done by her, milking is something inflicted upon her. The machines often cause cuts and injuries and can lead to mastitis, infection of the udder, which is rampant in modern dairies. Sometimes the milking machines give electrical shocks as well, causing considerable discomfort and fear. The cow may also be “drenched,” a procedure routinely performed on some cows after giving birth to reduce metabolic diseases in early lactation. Many gallons of nutrient-dense solution are forced into her through a seven-foot tube shoved down her throat. She may drown if the liquid is pumped too fast or if the tube is stuck into her windpipe. A similar procedure called lavage may be imposed on her newborn calf as well, to administer colostrum.

Right after the cow begins to be milked, she is again inseminated on the “rape rack” by the sperm gun. She is thus both pregnant and lactating simultaneously, and will be taken off the milking machine only during the last two months of pregnancy. As soon as she gives birth, the baby is again taken away, and she goes back on the milking machine and is raped and inseminated again.

All this causes enormous suffering for the mother cows, and their health breaks down quickly. The lactogenic hormones and cholesterol-laden feed and unnatural milking schedules cause the cows’ udders to become painful and so heavy they sometimes drag on the ground and in their own feces, increasing the painful mastitis and leading to overuse of antibiotics. Their udders are permanently stretched far beyond what they would be in nature, their ankles swollen and sore from standing constantly on concrete. After three to five years, these mother cows, dairy slaves, are worn out and sent off in overcrowded trucks to face the final insulting brutality of the slaughterhouse. The majority of “downed” cattle arriving at slaughterhouses are dairy cows. These are animals too weak, diseased, or injured to walk off the truck. Their bones may break easily because of osteoporosis brought on by high-protein feed and forced high-volume milk production. Transport may last for several days with no food or water through bitter cold or extreme heat. Sometimes the cows are literally frozen to the inner sides of the trucks. If they have collapsed, these “downers” are shocked with excruciatingly painful prods. If they still can’t move, they are literally dragged by chains, often tearing skin, ripping tendons and ligaments, and breaking bones in the process. They aren’t humanely euthanized because they’re seen merely as meat, and dead carcasses aren’t supposed to be butchered (though that also happens, according to worker affidavits in Gail Eisnitz’s Slaughterhouse). They’re dragged to the killing floor, where their bodies will be ripped apart to produce hamburger meat, animal feed, pet food, leather, gelatin, glue, and other products.

The same scenarios apply to dairies that produce so-called organic milk products, except that the feed is organic, there is a limit to some of the hormones and other toxins, and there may be a little more space in the prison stall. The cows are still slaughtered after a few years, and the same pricing mechanism drives the industry: to get the most milk for the cheapest price. Individual cows are worth very little, since maximizing pregnancies boosts milk production and there are always more calves on hand than can be used.

This brings us to the second possible path for calves born on the dairy: they may be killed shortly after birth if the veal industry and beef industry demand is low. The rennet in their young stomachs is valuable for making cheeses. Their bodies are then ground up for animal feed, and their skin is used for more expensive leather. Sometimes pregnant cows are sent off to slaughter. In this case, the fetal calves that fall out of them when they are sliced open must be killed separately by the slaughterhouse workers. These unborn babies are skinned for the soft leather on their small, wet bodies, which fetches quite a high price.

The third possible path for dairy-born calves is to be auctioned to the veal industry. Both males and females are forced down this dark and miserable path when they are not needed on the dairy (this includes organic dairies). The abuse these poor creatures must endure for their short lives is well known and documented. They are forced into veal crates and chained at the neck as soon as they arrive at the veal operation, only days or weeks old. These crates are built small, to confine the calves so they cannot move, causing their muscles to be undeveloped and their “meat” more tender. They are kept in darkness and fed a diet purposefully deficient in iron so their flesh will be pale, which brings a higher price. They will frantically suck on or lick any iron, like nails that happen to be within reach. They endure this cruel confinement, often covered with their own excrement. Their naturally joyful and frolicsome temperaments are destroyed by the pain and hopelessness of their situations. Their liquid diet is laced with chemicals, drugs, and antibiotics, and after three to four months, they are trucked to the slaughterhouse to be killed for the veal and calfskin markets.

The fourth path for dairy-born calves, if they are male, is to be auctioned to the meat industry and raised for beef. In this case they will face the intense pain of unanesthetized castration when they are still young. These poor animals may also be branded.often several times, inflicting extremely painful third-degree burns.and dehorned, which is also highly painful. They spend one to one and a half years either confined or grazing, growing to a size that makes them profitable to slaughter, and then are sent to the feedlot to be fattened.

On feedlots, hundreds or thousands of castrated cattle are crowded together for a few months with little or no shelter, in fetid confinement, and fed whatever the feedlot operators can devise to make them gain as much weight as quickly and cheaply as possible (when they are sold, the operators are paid by the pound). The unfortunate creatures, mere objects in the meat complex, are given artificial steroid growth promotants such as Ralgro, Synovex, or Rumensin so they will grow to be much heavier much younger than they ever would in nature.15 While cows are natural grass eaters who would never eat grain in the wild, feedlot operators, like dairy operators, have found that feeding them grain boosts growth and profits. Because grain (mainly corn, soybeans, wheat, and oats) is relatively expensive, it is supplemented with cheaper additives to add even more weight to the cattle. Well-known cattle feed additives are sawdust, cement dust, chicken manure, and petroleum by-products. All the toxins in the grain, as well as in the other substances, concentrate in the fat and flesh of the steer. Other feed additives are equally unpleasant to contemplate: the ground-up bodies and parts of animals obtained from the rendering industry. These animal products are especially high in concentrated toxins, as well as fat, cholesterol, and animal protein, which helps produce the marbled fat that brings a higher price. The young steers are not allowed to move around, since that would burn calories and toughen their flesh. Agribusiness has also discovered that if animals are fed antibiotics routinely in their feed, they grow faster, with the result that, according to the Union of Concerned Scientists, over seventy percent of all antibiotics produced in the U.S. are administered to animals imprisoned for food.16 Antibiotics are also administered to help combat the infections and diseases that are rampant in the overcrowded feedlot environment where the steers are imprisoned. And while it is comical to think of cows wading into streams to catch fish, the bizarre truth is that entire fish populations have been decimated in both the Atlantic and Pacific oceans by large-scale net-trawling fishing operations simply to supply fish to the livestock feed industry. This fish contains the fat and cholesterol that work so well to unnaturally fatten these unfortunate steers in the feedlots.

As soon as they can, the feedlot operators send the fattened steers to the slaughterhouse so their flesh can be eaten by humans and other herbivores, all imprisoned by a macabre fatten-and-kill operation that encompasses and pollutes the entire planet. Oceans, fields, pastures, forests, highways, zoos, ranches, circuses, laboratories, animal control agencies, pet breeding companies, and schools are linked to rendering plants and slaughterhouses in this web of violence, and the animals dominated or killed in these places contribute to the fattening of these steers so they can be more profitably killed. Their flesh is home to a defiling misery that may curse us in a variety of ways if we support the industry by patronizing it at the ubiquitous meat outlets that define our culture.

All four of the possible paths that a calf born on a dairy may take are paths of abuse and early death. Since bovines in the wild easily live twenty to thirty years, the industry, in killing calves, steers, and dairy cows at the ages of several months to several years, is really killing infants and children. In this it is the same as the industries that confine and kill lambs, pigs, chickens, turkeys, and fish: all are pushed to grow abnormally quickly and are slaughtered young. Similarly, in the wars we inflict upon each other, children suffer and die the most, and more than ever they are even forced to do the killing. The animal food culture promotes domination and exploitation of the female and the feminine, which are full of life-giving and nurturing powers, and of infants and children, who are full of the powers of innocence and growth.

The Mustache Mask

That innocent-looking and effective marketing tool, the dairy industry’s milk mustache, is thus actually a mask that hides the most sickening and inhumane industry practically imaginable. These docile vegetarian mothers and their unfortunate children are dominated from birth to death, unnaturally fattened on animal flesh so humans can fatten themselves on dairy products and cow flesh. One would almost hope that for their enormous sacrifice, the dairy cows would at least be supplying humans with something beneficial. And yet the deeper justice is inescapable: by killing them, we kill ourselves; by enslaving them, we enslave ourselves; by sickening them, we sicken ourselves.

Mother cows, like all lactating mammals, produce high levels of estrogen in their milk. It is not healthy for humans to take in this high estrogen load at any age. One obvious result is that young girls’ bodies are unnaturally pushed to become sexually mature at an early age. The average age of menarche, of first menstruation, instead of being seventeen as it was in the mid-nineteenth century, is now 12.5 years.17 This was made startlingly clear in Japan after World War II, where in the space of just one or two generations after dairy products were introduced there, the average age of menarche went from 15.2 to 12.5.18 According to researcher Kerrie Saunders, “Both African villages and the Chinese have retained many of their dietary traditions of eating plant-based foods, and they both average an onset of female puberty at seventeen years of age.”19 The unnaturally early menarche in our culture causes untold anguish, with unnecessary teen pregnancies, abortion dilemmas and debates, and unnatural physical, psychological, and social stress that is simply a result of pushing our girls into sexual maturity too early, just as we do to the young cow slaves on the dairy.

Even as they eat milk products, instigating the rape, exploitation, and death of other female animals, women may be viewed simultaneously by men as meat, mere objects to be used. Ironically, just as cows are forced to have unnaturally large and swollen mammary glands to overproduce milk for the dairy industry, the resulting foods produce unnaturally large mammary glands in the women who consume them.a feature that is prized in our herding culture and further reinforces women’s status as mere objects for the eyes of men. The interconnected dairy and meat industries perpetuate the patriarchal herding mentality that sees both animals and women as “meat,” to be milked and eaten in one case and used sexually in the other.

There are other disasters linked with human consumption of cow’s milk products. Charles Attwood, M.D., and T. Colin Campbell, Ph.D., have written,

Human epidemiological studies have strongly related animal protein consumption to various cancers. Of all animal protein, there is strong experimental evidence that casein, the principal protein of milk, is especially capable of promoting cancer development. . . .

What are the other problems with milk and dairy products? The majority of practicing pediatric allergists insist that more than half of their patients are allergic to one or more of milk’s more than two dozen proteins. Their allergy symptoms include eczema, asthma, middle ear infections, sinus infections, rhinitis, gastroenteritis, and allergic colitis.conditions responsible for eighty to ninety percent of doctor’s office visits. . . . 20

Eighty to ninety percent of doctor’s office visits.it’s not surprising that dairy products are promoted so heavily by the pharmaceuticalmedia-banking complex and that plant-based diets are discouraged.

The huge pathogen load that is permissible in pasteurized milk - five million pathogens per cup, more than two hundred times the load found in grains, vegetables, fruits, legumes, and nuts if uncontaminated in handling21.is a constant stress on the immune system and may increase risks for a whole spectrum of diseases as well as cancers of all types, especially breast and prostate cancer.22 Cow’s milk contains large amounts of pus, which is inevitable due to the high levels of bacteria in the traumatized udders of dairy cows, and pasteurization does not stem the incoming pathogen tide. Some pasteurized milk samples bought and tested by Consumer Reports contained as many as 30 million to 700 million microbes per cup!23 These pathogens, besides increasing risks for gastroenteritis, strep, and a variety of other illnesses, are also known to promote tooth decay, and babies who go to sleep nursing a bottle with cow’s milk are well known to risk partial or even complete dissolution of their teeth!24 According to researchers cited by Frank Oski, M.D., eating dairy products is linked with diarrhea, iron-deficiency anemia, gastrointestinal bleeding, kidney disease, eczema, bronchitis, allergies, asthma, hay fever, rheumatoid arthritis, hives, allergy to penicillin, leukemia, multiple sclerosis, and dental decay, as well as to the diabetes, obesity, and atherosclerosis caused by the high fat and cholesterol content.25

The protein in milk, particularly casein, while perfect for calves, is too large and difficult for us to digest. Calves have a particular enzyme, rennin, not present in humans, that coagulates and helps breaks down casein. According to renowned nutrition researcher T. Colin Campbell, “Cows’ milk protein may be the single most significant chemical carcinogen to which humans are exposed.”26 On top of this, cow’s milk is rich in natural growth hormone, to induce the newborn calf to grow many hundreds of pounds in just the first year of life. This growth-inducing substance, named by scientists insulin-like growth factor one (IGF-1), is absolutely identical, molecularly, to the IGF-1 in humans that spurs our growth as children. The extra dose of growth factor we receive in cow’s milk causes us to grow unnaturally, and not just in height. I remember, as a child raised in a typically heavy dairy-eating household, that my teeth were way too large for my mouth and my orthodontist, in sizing the bands needed to straighten them, exclaimed, “Wow! Looks like you’ve got cow’s teeth!”

In adults, studies have shown that excess IGF-1 from eating dairy products may increase the risk of cancer.27 Since we are not growing, as adults we normally have very little, if any, IGF-1 in our blood to promote the growth of new cells. The IGF-1 that enters our bloodstream when we eat dairy products has serious consequences. Recall that in the trillions of cells in our bodies, there are naturally some cancer cells erupting here and there all the time; with a healthy immune system, these cells are easily discovered and destroyed. Enter IGF-1 from cow’s milk. This growth factor is like gasoline thrown on a fire, stimulating sudden, rapid cell division in a small, easy-to-handle cancerous cell growth. The immune system, already overworked by the pathogen load and toxins in the dairy products, may not be able to contain it. The IGF1 in dairy products may actually be promoting cancer.yet famous people, including health professionals, appear in expensive advertising campaigns sporting milk mustaches, supporting the dairy industry!

Eggs: More Domination of the Feminine

As with dairy products, when we buy eggs we instigate theft and violence against horribly abused females and contribute to environmental contamination, social pathology, and disease. In egg agribusiness, the same principles apply that we have been discussing with the dairy industry, taken to even further extremes. Sentient females are categorized and reduced to mere monetary units of production, imprisoned in unimaginably crowded, stressful, and filthy conditions, their eggs stolen.and then, when they are no longer capable of producing at a high enough level, they are brutally killed.

Chicken eggs are toxic for humans in the manner of all animal products. First, they are made up of animal protein, saturated fat, and cholesterol, all three of which clog arteries, acidify blood and tissues, impair the immune system, and stress the body in a variety of ways, as has been discussed. Eggs, in fact, are the most concentrated packets of cholesterol available in supermarkets. Second, eggs concentrate noxious pesticide, chemical, hormonal, and bacterial residue. Third, eating eggs is eating the vibrations of misery, as will become evident below when we look at methods of egg production.

Like all the animals whose bodies are used to produce food for our dining tables, chickens are seen as mere commodities. Individual chickens in egg-laying operations are so cheap to replace that they are virtually worthless and are treated as such. They spend their lives in battery cages, small wire prisons fourteen to sixteen inches high and eighteen to twenty inches across, each containing four to eight hens packed in so tightly that they can never spread their wings. The wires of the cages chafe most of their feathers away, leaving them naked, wounded, and unprotected.28 They may get their heads, wings, or legs stuck between the wires and thus starve to death, their rotting corpses endured by the other hens in their cage. Their feet are painfully cut by the wires, which can become embedded in their flesh as their feet grow around them. The battery cages are stacked four or five rows high, with the feces and urine from those above falling on the heads and bodies of the birds beneath them, finally landing in a stinking waste pit into which some chickens who manage somehow to escape their prisons fall and slowly die.

As with the dairy industry, the egg industry is founded upon the total domination of the feminine, and upon the manipulation of female bodies to maximize profits with no regard to the outrageous cruelty involved. And because chickens are smaller and held in even lower esteem than cows, they are brutalized even more blatantly in the quest for cheap eggs. Female chicks are routinely debeaked, an exceedingly traumatic operation in which about half of the beak is chopped off. The hot blade cuts through the most sensitive nerve tissue in their beaks, causing such acute pain that the birds’ heart rate increases by over one hundred beats per minute. Many die on the spot. For those who survive, the chronic pain from this procedure may last their whole lives and interfere with eating. Male chicks are unneeded, so workers mass-annihilate them, either by live suffocation and crushing in large plastic trash bags or by dumping them living into machines with rotating blades like wood chippers that turn them into instant chicken feed or fertilizer. Hens who no longer produce enough eggs have also been disposed of by being thrown living into the spinning blades of wood chipping machines.

The egg industry acknowledges the huge number of diseases and syndromes that are inherent in the battery system: painful foot and leg deformities, as well as broken and tangled wings and legs, from the wire cages; calcium deficiency, as well as painful prolapsed and distended uteruses, from being forced to produce unnaturally large quantities of eggs; caged layer osteoporosis, which is the loss of bone tissue directly attributed to being immobilized; fatty liver syndrome and swollen head syndrome due to poor-quality food and air and being forced to live constantly in filth and stress; lung and eye problems from the ammonia-drenched air; lost eyes from henpecks by desperate cagemates; and salmonella, in which the hen’s oviducts become infested with salmonella bacteria, passing the infection to consumers through the eggs. It is well established that antibiotics are given to battery hens in basically one hundred percent of egg operations to control the bacterial diseases that thrive in these squalid conditions. Antibiotics are also found to increase egg production, but, as with all creatures, including humans, antibiotics increase other problems, since they disrupt and kill the intestinal microflora that are necessary for digestion and elimination, thus weakening the immune system. Toxic pesticide residues from the feed, antibiotic residues, and hormonal, chemical, and pathogenic bacteria residues all concentrate in the fat and eggs of these hens, making them extremely unhealthy to consume.29

The tens of thousands of chickens crammed into one egg production shed have nowhere to move and no way to nest, establish social order, or in any way express their natural intelligence or purpose. The artificial lighting schedule that keeps them in almost continuous darkness, and the feed and drugs are all designed with only one goal: to cut costs and maximize the number of eggs that drop from the hens’ uteruses and roll down the slanted wire cage bottoms to be whisked away on the conveyor belt. On modern chicken operations, this is over 250 eggs per year, more than two and a half times the number hens would lay under more natural conditions.30 In nature, a hen is particular about her nest and often chooses the right place to lay her precious egg in partnership with a rooster. When she actually lays the egg in her carefully prepared nest, it is “obviously for the hen a moment full of pride and satisfaction.”31 Contrast this with the following description of egg laying for a caged chicken.

The frightened battery hen starts to panic as she vainly searches for privacy and a suitable nesting place in the crowded but bare wire cage; then she appears to become oblivious to her surroundings, struggling against the cage as though trying to escape. . . .

Take a moment to imagine yourself as a layer chicken; your home is a crowded cage with a wire floor that causes your feet to hurt and become deformed; there’s no room to stretch your legs or flap your wings and they become weak from lack of exercise; but at the same time, you can never be still because there is always one of your miserable cell mates who needs to move about; one of the other chickens is always picking on you and you cannot get away - except by letting others sit on top of you; the air is filled with dust and flying feathers that stick to the sides of the cage splattered with chicken shit from the inmates in the cage upstairs; it is hard to breathe - there is the choking stench of ammonia in the air from the piles of manure under the cages and you don’t feel at all well; the flies are unbearable despite the insecticide sprayed in the air and laced in your food - to kill the fly larvae before they mature; the food - never green and fresh - seldom varies and tastes always of the chemical additives and drugs needed to keep you alive; eventually, despite your wretchedness and anguish, and the tormented din of thousands of birds shrieking their pain together, you lay an egg and watch it roll out of sight; but the joy of making a nest, of giving birth, of clucking to your chicks is absent - laying the egg is an empty, frustrating, and exhausting ritual.32

All family and social and natural life is destroyed. These hens know neither mothers nor children, neither mates nor earth nor sun. They are born in hatcheries, debeaked and then sentenced to the caged slavery of egg production.

When a population of thousands of hens in an egg operation is at the end of its laying cycle, the hens will either be gassed and killed, since their tortured bodies have so little flesh they aren’t worth the trouble of shipping to slaughter, or they may be slaughtered for the low-grade meat used in chicken soup and pet food. Often, though, the hens are force-molted first, to shock their bodies into another cycle of egg laying. This is done by withholding food and water and administering a combination of drugs, including hormones. The forced starvation may last up to two weeks, typically killing many birds in the process. After they have been force-molted once or twice, soon to be slaughtered for chicken soup, the birds are roughly yanked from their cages, tossed into trucks, and taken away to make room for the next wave of hen slaves. We can perhaps be born into no worse hell in this universe than being a female chicken on an industrial egg farm in the United States.

In so-called free-range egg operations the hens are all typically debeaked, as in standard egg factories, and males are all brutally killed at birth. The chickens are still treated as objects, pushed to produce, and killed cruelly when they are no longer profitable. The term free-range has surprisingly little legal meaning, and there are thus no rules governing the amount of space a free-range hen must have, so though their confinement may be less extreme than the usual battery cages, they are nevertheless typically crammed together in enormous, stinking sheds where they never see the light of day.33

The Web of Connections

Female cows and chickens are ruthlessly dominated to provide products that are vital and healthy for their offspring, community, and species but cause disease, pollution, hunger, and suffering when consumed by humans. When we steal their milk and eggs and kill their children, we set up the conditions for the same to happen to us. The fates of cow mothers and human mothers, cow babies and human babies, ultimately run parallel. If we allow corporations to steal, use, and kill cow and chicken babies, it will happen to our babies also. In fact, it is already happening.

The negative effects of consuming dairy products and eggs on individual health are linked to negative consequences for our world ecosystems and our culture. Everything is connected; the consumption of dairy products and eggs is linked with: allergies, skin disorders, cancer, heart disease, strokes, diabetes, and a laundry list of other ailments; the arsenal of products and procedures marketed by the medical industry to combat these unnecessary ailments (all of which are major sources of pollution and disempowerment); the enormous profits accumulated by the agribusiness, chemical, pharmaceutical, and banking industries from our domination of female animals; the social inequality and injustice that this promotes, giving rise to elitism and further conflict; the environmental and human health effects of agricultural runoff, which is poisoning rivers, killing fish, contributing to human cancer, and causing red tides that inflict respiratory disease; the lives lost in wars caused by spiraling demand for petroleum and by desperation, as water rights go to rich agribusiness dairy and chicken operations funded by U.S. banks in Third World countries while poor people face chronic thirst and contaminated water. . . .

The web of connections surrounding our consumption of dairy products and eggs is vast and includes all beings. When we feed on other animals’ milk and eggs, we are feeding on their fear and despair, on the violence that a patriarchal mentality systematically enforces on them. If we look deeply, we’ll see that this mentality breeds violence in our lives as well. Should we, who long for mercy, freedom, and joy, and for a more enlightened society that supports peace and respect for our earth and the sacredness of all life, be the agents of such violence? When we make the connection between our culturally induced desire to eat dairy and egg products and the cruelty to vulnerable mothers that this will necessarily entail, our intelligence and compassion are nourished, and we naturally begin to make new choices. There are plenty of substitutes for animal-derived milk products and eggs, and they are becoming increasingly available as more of us make these connections.

Reviving Sophia

Dominating others requires us to disconnect from them, and from aspects of ourselves as well. In exploiting dairy cows and hens, we dominate them not just for their flesh, skin, bones, and the other body parts that we can use or sell; we specifically exploit their uteruses and mammary glands. This inhumane desecration of the most intimate and life-giving functions of the feminine principle, that of giving birth to new life and of tenderly nourishing that life, harms us perhaps as deeply as it does the cows, though our wounds may be less obvious. Many spiritual teachers have pointed out that when we harm others, we harm ourselves even more severely. The hard-heartedness of the killer and exploiter is in itself a terrible punishment because it is a loss of sensitivity to the beauty and sacredness of life. That loss may go unrecognized, but the life itself, armored, violent, and competitive, is lived as a struggle of separateness and underlying fear, and its relations with others are poisoned.

By enslaving and cruelly exploiting cow mothers and babies in dairy operations, we attack and injure the sacred feminine within ourselves as well as in nature. This is an attack on our essential being, on our sense of nurturing life and protecting the vulnerable. These are truly terrible seeds to be sowing, for the feminine principle within us all is the seat of loving-kindness, receptivity, caring, and the urge to nurture and protect. In attacking our own inner feminine principle, we become as a culture harder and more separate, competitive, aggressive, and self-centered. Ironically, we become commodities ourselves, controlled and enslaved by a system of our own making, yet we don’t realize it because we’ve been taught to disconnect. We learn to cover our ears to block out the plaintive cries of cow mothers on dairies. We block out the cries of human mothers whose babies are taken from them - thousands every day - by easily preventable starvation. We block out the cries of mothers whose babies are killed by bombs and bullets fired by boys serving the military death machine. Who will hear or heed our cries if we don’t heed the cries of these mothers?

Liberating and honoring the feminine principle is perhaps the most pressing task in our culture’s evolution toward peace, sustainability, and spiritual maturity. The feminine principle, cross-culturally, is concerned fundamentally with nurturing, receptivity, making connections, intuition, and bringing forth new life. In our herding culture, these qualities are not respected because the work of herding animals requires men to become hard and cruel, and to emphasize their separateness from and superiority to animals, nature, and the life-giving processes of the feminine. This has led to a patriarchal mentality concerned fundamentally with domination, control, separation, rational analysis, commodification, war, and killing. Its basic dictum in human affairs follows from its fundamental herding orientation toward animals, which is that might makes right. And yet the feminine principle is still alive, longed for, and beloved, because we know at the deepest levels that this is a vital aspect of our essential nature.

Veneration of the sacred feminine goes back many millennia, predating the rise of our herding culture, and we still remember this even though the ancient goddesses have been supplanted by the decidedly male deities now recognized by conventional Western religion and science, the Lord God/Jehovah and Reason. The Greek term for the third person of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit, Hagia Sophia or Holy Wisdom, was feminine, though this was lost when translated later into Latin as the masculine Spiritus Sanctus, which made all three aspects of the Christian trinity male to the detriment of women, animals, nature, and our culture’s spiritual depth. The loss of Sophia - Holy Wisdom - was inevitable as the domination and male violence required by commodifying animals continued to spread and intensify. But Sophia, though repressed, could never die, and has lived on, disguised as Mary, as Beatrice, and as the Paraclete, another term for the Holy Spirit, Greek for “Comforter.” One form this takes is the resilient archetype of the Fairy Godmother, symbolizing the benevolent feminine process mediating between the visible and invisible realms. Philo-sophia, literally the “love of wisdom,” was originally a quest for Sophia as intuitive wisdom that would be spiritually liberating and significant. As the feminine principle and intuition were increasingly trivialized and despised, however, Western philosophy lost much of its potential depth and eventually became a shallow accomplice to science.

Sophia’s symbol is the cup, grail, or chalice, which, unlike the traditional symbol of male divinity - the sword, spear, blade, or thunderbolt - is nonviolent and non-threatening. It holds, nurtures, fills, mixes, connects, and gives birth. The cauldron and bowl represent the feminine receptivity that is essential to intuitive wisdom and spiritual maturity. Sophia’s cup eventually became the central image of one of our most fundamental stories, that of the Holy Grail, in which sword-bearing knights searched in vain to find the lost grail cup. At deep levels, we recognize that what has been lost is the feminine approach to wisdom and that an unbalanced masculine approach of unbridled reductionism brings war, disease, and perversity to the degree it has repressed the feminine principle and spurned a partnership with the wisdom that connects, nurtures, and gives form to life.

In myths, fairy tales, poetry, drama, art, and other deep cultural expressions, we can see the loss mourned everywhere, from Odysseus, Orestes, Antigone, and the Ramayana through Faust, Galahad, Lear, and Parsifal to modern epics like Star Wars and the Lord of the Rings. The true self or radiant indwelling Christ-nature is repressed or lost and is replaced by a false self, a persona or mask that is insecure, fragmented, proud, and convinced of its separateness and need to dominate and control. In fairy tales, one way this is expressed is through archetypal tales involving a wrongful ruler who usurps the throne and drives the country and people into war, poverty, and ruin. We sometimes see this mythic archetype thrust strikingly into reality on the world’s political stage, with false and rigged elections and the disastrous consequences of administrations that further the oppressive and violent herder mentality by propagating war and the interests of a privileged elite at the expense of disadvantaged people, animals, ecosystems, and future generations.

At a deeper symbolic level, the mask and the usurper represent not only the deluded and conniving ego, but also our native herding culture, which has spread and conquered less aggressive cultures and still enforces its mentality of domination and its core practice of commodifying and eating animals. The usurper continues today, attacking nature, women, animals, and the vulnerable as it strives to consolidate control in a few elite hands. It derives power from the public’s regular daily meals of hidden violence. Consuming and killing have become defining activities, fed by the disconnectedness and repressed guilt that accompany our suppression of the feminine principle. Beings who are the subjects of their lives are forced into the role of mere objects, and both people and animals end up becoming things. The way hunters, fishers, and herders look at animals, the way corporate developers look at nature, and the way men are typically taught to look at women, and how women typically learn to be looked at by men, are all part of this process.

Enormous suffering is inevitable in all this, polluting relationships and eroding the spiritual sensitivity that sees beyond materialistic, I-it dualisms to the sacred subjects that are always present in living beings. As individuals and as a culture, our ability to heal, transform, and evolve beyond this old defiling mentality is tied to our food choices more than to anything else. To meditate for world peace, to pray for a better world, and to work for social justice and environmental protection while continuing to purchase the flesh, milk, and eggs of horribly abused animals exposes a disconnect that is so fundamental that it renders our efforts absurd, hypocritical, and doomed to certain failure.

We are hearing a call from our inner wisdom to reawaken respect for the feminine principle. Can we ever be successful in answering this call while still imprisoning, raping, abusing, and killing millions of mothers just for our pleasure, continuing our subservience to social pressure and indoctrination? The inner feminine is our intuition, our sensitivity, and our ability to sense the profound interconnectedness of events and beings, and it is vital to peace, wisdom, joy, intelligence, creativity, and spiritual awakening. With every baby calf stolen from her mother and killed, with every gallon of milk stolen from enslaved and broken mothers, with every thrust of the raping sperm gun, with every egg stolen from a helpless, frantic hen, and with every baby chick killed or locked for life in a hellish nightmare cage, we kill the sacred feminine within ourselves. By ordering and eating products from the industrial herding complex that dominates the feminine with an iron fist, we squelch our opportunities for maturing to higher levels of understanding, sensitivity, and compassion. We remain merely ironic in our quests.

Our welfare is ultimately dependent on the welfare of others. By freeing and encouraging others we are liberated and encouraged. We can never sever our connection to all beings, but we can ignore and violate it, planting seeds of tragedy and suffering. Honoring our natural place in the web of life by eating the foods intended for us will plant seeds of abundance, love, and freedom, whatever our religion may be. Our prayers for peace will bear fruit when we are living the prayer for peace and, most importantly, when we offer peace to those who are at our mercy and who also long for peace and the freedom to live their lives and fulfill their purposes.

Achieving peace among human beings, from the household to the international battlefields, depends upon treating each other with respect and kindness. This will be possible when we first extend that respect and kindness to those who are at our mercy and who cannot retaliate against us. If we are sincere in our quest for human peace, freedom, and dignity, we have no choice but to offer this to our neighbors, the animals of this earth. Cultivating awareness, we can transcend the imposed view that animals are mere food objects. With this, we will see consumerism, pornography, and the disconnectedness that leads inexorably to slavery and self-destruction evaporate. As the mentality of domination and exclusivism fades, we will be able to heal divisions of gender, race, and class.