A popular vegan argument against dairy consumption has been revealed to be false!
The myth often repeated by die-hard vegans including myself is “Man is the only species to consume the milk of another species.”
Wrong.
A careful analysis of YouTube cute animal videos shows that there’s a whole lot of interspecies nursing going on. It’s not just cows nursing people!
If you’re online, you can see cats nursing baby squirrels; dogs nursing kittens; goats nursing foals; cats nursing puppies; dogs nursing fawns; cats nursing, yes, ducklings.
We’re not alone in our love for the milk of a different animal! (And who said YouTube animal videos are a waste of time?)
Not so fast. Several animal advocacy groups have already clarified the statement, pointing out: We’re the only species to consume the milk of another species as adults, on a regular basis.
Those tiny squirrels were in an emergency situation. Their mother, for some reason, wasn’t there. The cat took over, protecting them from starvation and death.
Especially for human grown-ups, milkshakes and Cheezits are not the only remedies protecting us against starvation and death. There ARE other things to eat in America. After all, we’re not baby squirrels, alone in somebody’s backyard, crying for Mommy.
— A Vicious Vegan blog post —
The only thing I wonder about, not that I am promoting the dairy industry here, but just attempting to sort thing out in some sort of historical or cultural way, is that humans have been fermenting milk into kefir and yogurt and cheese for some time. Nutritionally speaking, these can be good foods. Ethically speaking, I don’t see this as ok nowadays. Perhaps those older agrarian/pastoral cultures didn’t take the calves away and took only a little milk for fermenting. I do not know. We seem to like fermented stuff. But then so do many critters. We just take it too far.
Hi Karen,
Thanks for commenting. I don’t think that dairy products are good foods nutritionally speaking. Dairy products are high-cholesterol foods. They have no fiber, no anti-oxidants and usually a lot of fat. Non-fat dairy has very high levels of protein, probably not great for our systems. They’re also acid-producing, i.e., they contribute to inflammation.