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I saw this on social media and personally I don’t see a link between feminism and dairy but as we had that big discussion re womens rights and abortion what is everyone’s take on this?
I mean you can shoe horn anything to fit your agenda. I don’t eat meat and I don’t eat much dairy (love cheese though) but this just seems
bleeping insane to me, I generally stay away from veggie/vegan pages as it all gets a bit intense and millitant. (I snoop for food ideas etc I don’t base my whole persona around my food choices
) Opinions?
I both agree and disagree, as a vegan.
Cows and hens are abused horrifically for their female bodies.
There is no milk without killing calves. Dairy cows are kept in a constant cycle of pregnancy and birth to keep their milk coming. (This often involves artificial insemination). The babies are torn from their mothers after a few days, if female they will usually be fed formula and raised to be dairy cows, if male they will be slaughtered for veal.
Dairy cows are bred to produce ten times more milk than is natural, leading to agonising mastitis. They spend their days hooked up to milking machines. They are slaughtered very young, about age 7 or younger, when their milk yields start to decline.
Hens are bred to produce an unnatural number of eggs. In the wild, they made a few clutches per year, like many birds. Domestic hens lay eggs constantly. This leaves them prone to cloacal prolapses, and cripples their bones with nutrient deficiencies. Most hens are factory farmed and kept imprisoned in small cages (even “enriched” cages are still small), and slaughtered very young, like cows. Most free range eggs come from hens that live in large, over-crowded sheds together, with theoretical access to outside space via small openings. In reality, many hens may not be able to reach the outside. Free range hens can have more injuries than factory-farmed, as being over-crowded causes them to fight.
The powerful mothering instinct in women is often used to denigrate women as stupid and emotions, and more like animals. Instead, we should see the link between species of similar mothering instincts to recognise the intelligence and sentience of animals, and have empathy for them.
Women’s bodies are abused for their reproductive potential, and female animals suffer reproductive abuse. There is a link.
The presence of a new slaughterhouse significantly raises violent and sexual crimes in the surrounding area, including rapes. If something unequivocally increases women being sexually abused, then it is a feminist concern.
Also women will be more impacted by climate change, and animal agriculture is one of the biggest causes of climate change. Not just from methane and other greenhouse gas emissions, but because it’s responsible for 94% of all deforestation.
So yes, animal agriculture is absolutely a feminist issue, and vegans should be allowed to talk about it without being attacked.
On the other hand saying “you can be this unless you’re also that” for any cause is unhelpful and provocative. Vegans ourselves are used to this, being lectured by uneducated hateful people that we “care about animals rather than humans” and listing all the ways in which vegans should be solely responsible for solving every single social problem in the entire world, before they’ll allow us to even think about animal agriculture.
There can also be infighting from a small number of new vegans, with some demanding that every other vegan has to agree with them on every other tangentially related cause.
It causes strife and achieves nothing, it doesn’t attract anyone to the extra causes are demanded of us.
I know feminists suffer similar and they refer to it as expecting them to be “activism nannies”. When these demands come from outsiders - like with outsiders attacking vegans - it’s mostly whataboutery by haters (who don’t give a
tit about the causes they demand we spend our energy on) trying undermine the cause and its supporters.
So, in summary, while animal agriculture is definitely a feminist issue, I would never demand that if people support one cause they must support another, because it’s unhelpful and achieves nothing but ill feeling. People often only have the energy to devote their time to one cause. That’s ok, no one can save the world alone.
That said, feminists shouldn’t attack vegans for raising awareness of the harms of animal agriculture on women, or the abuse of female animals. Just pass over it if you’re not interested.
Demands to be-vegan-or-you’re-not feminist are over-simplified and absolutely unacceptable; simply talking about the links between feminism and veganism are fine. Any feminist who wants to shut vegans up knows we have a point, but doesn’t want to be vegan herself. Rather than just… not being vegan and respecting those who are, they want to stop vegans talking entirely to avoid their own mental discomfort.
