A system of sustainable farming and pro-worker food industries that produce nutrition will have to be a part of an ethical future where all sentient life can have the dignity to thrive. There might be no ethical consumption under capitalism, but mass suffering can be addressed and must be a part of comprehensive social justice advocacy.
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INDIA’s distinct history with animal rights and the dairy industry is missing from social justice advocacy. Our battle with human rights has taught us that we can arbitrarily decide what groups of people are entitled to more resources, dignity and love. It is precisely why we need to rethink the normalisation of animals as products.
The success of India’s dairy industry was defined as ‘the power of collective ambition’ because it helped millions of small farmers gain autonomy and fairer income. The White Revolution ended the country’s international dairy dependence decades after independence.
Dairy has become the quintessential marker of middle-class nutrition. Today, milk and its products are ubiquitous household items but are increasingly linked to religious identity and a rising sense of Hindutva nationalism.
Our obsession with dairy has roots in the intersections of class, access and industrialisation. India is the world’s leading milk producer and, ironically, global beef producer and exporter. Brahminical vegetarianism has boosted the reputation of dairy but has demonised beef while ignoring the strong interdependence between beef and the dairy industry.
Animal rights activists started to be taken seriously only in the last decade when it came to the unholier parts of the cattle industry.
Cows and buffalos are artificially inseminated to optimise and increase dairy production. They are subjected to a process euphemistically called ‘artificial insemination’.
The dairy industry’s cruelty is often left out of mainstream narratives. Only a couple of decades ago, animal welfare was relegated to the idea of vegetarianism. Vegetarianism seems to link more directly to the cause of animal harm. But India’s relationship with vegetarianism is distinct and primarily rooted in the upper-caste culture, which loosely wraps around ideals of ahimsa. The distinction of vegetarians in India is that most aren’t doing it with animal rights as a primary motivator but due to culture and habit.
This is why cruelty against cows is incredibly complicated. The pan-Indian regard for cows comes from a perceived Hindu sentiment. We have glorified the idea of symbiosis— a natural give and take that is respectful and natural. This encourages the notion that milk is gently coddled out of willing cows in quaint rural settings.
The dairy industry’s truth is far darker. Animal rights advocates point to the billion-dollar animal product industry with animals as the core. Once sentience has become consumable, these animals cease to be beings worthy of existing with dignity and safety— they become a means to an end. Yet, as the leading dairy producer of the world, India’s acknowledgment of the cruelty involved in our everyday tea and curd is kept far from the mainstream conversation.
History of dairy in India
Until 1946, Gujarat-based private company Polson led most of India’s milk production, was the middleman for dairy farmers, and gave them low wages. Milk production was exceedingly low compared to other countries, especially considering the number of cattle.
Dairy consumption was relegated to the upper class until Sardar Vallabhai Patel, one of the pioneers in envisioning the upscaling of dairy, asked Tribhuvandas Patel to take charge, resulting in the founding of Anand Milk Union Limited (Amul).
With the hiring of Verghese Kurien, the brain behind Operation Flood, Amul was a roaring success. Amul was born from the idea that dairy farmers could directly access their consumers and participate in developing dairy technology.
In the 1950s, a farmer strike set things in motion for the formation of milk cooperatives to increase and optimise milk production while allowing farmers to access their consumers directly.
Later, Harichand Megha Dalaya invented spray dryers, a technology to optimise milk solids and baby formula from buffalo milk. It radically changed how Indians consumed dairy and the ease with which they could access products in various forms.
In 1964, then-Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Sashtri wanted to replicate the Anand cooperative model and appointed Kurien the National Dairy Development Board head. By the early 1990s, there were 10 million farm families. Privatisation started soon after the relaxation of regulations for cooperatives.
What is so scary about dairy?
Cows and buffaloes are artificially inseminated to optimise and increase dairy production. They are subjected to a process euphemistically called ‘artificial insemination’. The equipment used for insemination is not regulated and rarely hygienic. Handlers are seldom animal health care professionals, resulting in pain and cruelty.
Cows are also injected with hormones to produce milk for longer durations. These hormones are in our milk and contribute to rising lactose intolerance.
Dairy cattle are tied in stalls with ropes passing through their noses. They are unable to sit or rest. Even from a welfare perspective, there is zero regularisation or implementation of standard lengths of rope, access to water or relief from heat.
Dairy cattle are tied in stalls with ropes passing through their noses. They are unable to sit or rest. Even from a welfare perspective, there is zero regularisation or implementation of standard lengths of rope, access to water or relief from heat.
The treatment of most bull calves is the cruellest. They are separated from their mothers and left to die. Some of them are sent to slaughterhouses or abandoned. Ageing dairy cows, usually over 14 years of age, are too expensive for small farmers to maintain and are sold to abattoirs. Since most dairy buffaloes are sent to slaughterhouses, India produces half of the world’s beef.
Also read: Ban on trade of cattle for slaughter, does the Centre have the power?
The political nuances of this practice are especially insidious. Although ‘beef’ export is not legal, buffalo meat is. Cows aren’t the only source of consumption of dairy products; much of it comes from buffaloes. The polarisation of purity politics and ‘beef’, cows and Islamophobia have a strong link that exposes the shallowness of politics— one that has nothing to do with ethical questions about the right of cows and buffaloes to exist with dignity and safety.
Gaushalas were established to protect cows and look after their welfare. They reflect the nation’s religious sentiment for cows and are usually found under the responsibility of a temple community in urban and rural areas. They are shelters for stray cows and those not producing milk.
Also read: The Indian judiciary and its not so holier-than-cow verdicts
However, with no regulatory healthcare or welfare standards, gaushalas rarely have veterinary care or qualified animal care professionals. Only private dairy factories have 24×7 veterinarians with the prerogative of keeping cows healthy enough to be milked to the maximum.
Even in urban areas, commercial dairy farms prefer tie stalls mainly due to space constraints. It’s common to find animals tied closely with each other with little scope for movement and expression of natural behaviour. Most of their short lives are fixed in one space.
Dairy from animal rights perspective
Veganism is gaining popularity with some familiar mainstream vegan awareness content on social media stressing that ‘milk is not meant for humans to digest’ or ‘we are the only species that consume another species of milk meant for calves, not us’.
The dairy industry’s cruelty is often left out of mainstream narratives. Only a couple of decades ago, animal welfare was relegated to the idea of vegetarianism.
While the statement is true, humans are the only species to do many absurd things— consuming milk is one of them. Several advocates for human rights and the climate crisis have called for changes for the betterment of humans.
Regarding animal rights, we often rely on busting nutritional myths, citing environmental damages and illustrating the copious amounts of water and resources that go to crops used to feed animals. But we rarely focus on the core issue: subjecting living beings to torturous conditions and breeding them literally as products.
The gravity of this question is often met with responses like, ‘Well, that is sad, but what other choice do we have?’
The lackadaisical responses to the vegan rhetoric are often rooted in our attachment, identity and relationship with our consumption.
When social change knocks on your door, it is far more challenging to address. We need to understand how our food is increasingly factory-farmed and that access to animal products getting quicker, easier and cheaper only means increasing the potent suffering of sentient lives.
Also read: Unravelling politics of Hindu vegetarianism and animal rights in India
Many social justice activists get defensive at the mention of animal rights contending that the poor and the marginalised need access to cheap, nourishing foods, including meat and dairy.
Many activists and citizens identifying with the Left or progressive politics take a U-turn on animal rights, making it especially hard for progressive and intersectional vegans to communicate the more significant ethical point we should acknowledge.
Animal rights advocates and intersectional vegans are cognisant of the material reality. Our advocacy has nothing to do with taking away food or making nutrition inaccessible to people. Instead, it calls for looking at how we have designed a system wherein the entire existence of animals is subject to pain and early death.
Vegan advocacy asks us to reimagine how we think about food and how using substitutes can slowly shift our collective consciousness. Just like any social justice idea, change takes a lifetime, but sitting complicit or redirecting arguments to other ironies and problems capitalism brings with it is not the answer.
If we stick to that argument, we risk running a perpetual excuse to continue acute cruelty to animals because capitalism is inherently exploitative. If that is the crux of the argument, we should also give up fighting for any social change or human rights issues. While no existence can be free of cruelty, we are at a point in human history where we breed and kill 70 billion animals a year just for consumption.
Human and animal rights are linked
India has been battling its religious identity politically and cows are in the middle of this fight. The politics of the beef ban is fascist and unsecular. While no intersectional animal rights advocate would support the beef ban, the ethical praxis of the issue is ignored. Why are we always coming up with more excuses to keep the system as it is instead of imagining kinder ways of nourishing ourselves?
Cruelty against cows is incredibly complicated. The pan-Indian regard for cows comes from a perceived Hindu sentiment.
If we would like to identify ourselves as progressive humans, it is paramount to note how arbitrary the assumption is that animals can only be used as a product to serve humans. Through this lens, we might understand how humans also assume which groups are worthy of access to resources, love and dignity and which groups are meant to serve us.
We call it racism, casteism and classicism. Institutionally, humans treat the disabled and mentally ill as lesser beings as well.
Animal rights and intersectional veganism point out our dangerous ability to normalise acute discrimination within our species. It points to the idea that humans can justify violence upon living beings when desired. An honest introspection will show animal rights’ ethical potency for our generation of thinkers and changers.
The planet will not go vegan in our lifetime— but creating discourse and dietary changes, and advocating for anti-oppression solutions are critical for this evolution. The future will use food technology to reinvent how we think about food and source it.
Many social justice activists get defensive at mentioning animal rights contending that the poor and the marginalised need access to cheap, nourishing foods, including meat and dairy.
This is not necessarily an ‘unnatural’ thing; humans can have enormous scientific achievements— for example, vaccines for fighting the coronavirus. Why are rational scientific answers not encouraged only regarding animal products?
A system of sustainable farming and pro-worker food industries that produce nutrition will have to be a part of an ethical future where all sentient life can have the dignity to thrive. There might be no ethical consumption under capitalism, but mass suffering can be addressed and must be a part of comprehensive social justice advocacy.
