"I have two sons. If I were a cow, they’d both be dead by now, killed and eaten."
Anna with one of her two sons.
Although I was vegan before becoming a mother, the entire basis of the
dairy industry became particularly disturbing to me after I had my first
child. Pregnancy and labour are hard, both mentally and physically. It takes
months, even years to fully recover. They’re worth it, though, for the gift
of a child.
Like humans, cows excrete oxytocin— the bonding hormone— at birth. Human
mothers can express what this feels like: we say we would die for our child,
we’re deliriously in love, we can’t believe such a love exists. This is the
oxytocin talking.
I have two sons. If I were a cow, they’d both be dead by now, killed and
eaten. I’d still be mourning them, and maybe others, too. However, it’s
almost worse to think that if I had daughters they’d be suffering my same
fate. Losing a child is any mother’s nightmare, but so is the knowledge that
your children are suffering.
It would be excruciating for any sensitive species to watch their beloved
child being brutally taken away, helpless to do anything, with no
understanding of what was happening or why. Mother cows will relive that
nightmare year after year until their bodies are depleted from back-to-back
pregnancies when they’re killed and eaten themselves. To think we do all
this for the sake of unnecessary dairy foods is difficult to comprehend.
Anna Pippus nursing her baby at a dairy protest.
Above is a picture of me breastfeeding my youngest baby at a dairy
protest. He’ll drink my milk until he weans, and then he’ll stop drinking
milk from any mothers.
Becoming a mother has only strengthened my belief that commercial animal
agriculture is immoral and my resolve to work towards ending it. The
perversion of motherhood is rampant throughout this grotesque system, beyond
the gentle mother cows who grieve their children. It’s also present in the
thousands of orphaned chickens in barns being raised for meat, peeping for
their mothers and finding no comfort. It’s present in the pigs unable to
stretch through the aches of pregnancy because they are so tightly confined,
and never being able to snuggle with their babies as pigs love to do. It’s
present in the chickens laying unfertilized egg after egg until their
uteruses prolapse or their bones fracture from the loss of calcium.
I’ve seen footage of cows in milking parlours so fresh from birth that
afterbirth is dangling down behind them. Their babies are gone, but there’s
no time to recover or to mourn, they must be hooked up to machines to have
their milk taken for humans. The system is sickening.
None of us would want to be impregnated again and again, to fruitlessly
endure the challenges of pregnancy and labour, and ultimately to have our
children stolen away from us. We shouldn’t put others through this either.
Number of animals killed in the world by the fishing, meat, dairy and egg industries, since you opened this webpage.
0 marine animals
0 chickens
0 ducks
0 pigs
0 rabbits
0 turkeys
0 geese
0 sheep
0 goats
0 cows / calves
0 rodents
0 pigeons/other birds
0 buffaloes
0 dogs
0 cats
0 horses
0 donkeys and mules
0 camels / camelids