The Dairy Industry

What actions should transgressive movements take?   What typical forms of co-ordination should activists develop?

Veganism is all important.   We have an obligation to teach people how to cook, how to eat, and how wonderful vegan food can be.   I know in America, as in Australia, the average person is eating only 3 vegetables: French-fried potatoes, pickles and ketchup.   Yet if you go to your local veggie markets you'll find 40 fruits, 40 vegetables, 20 grains and 20 beans to choose between.   As Tolstoy said in his very famous essay,  "The First Step":  "We have so many options today.  So many wonderful foods there is no longer a reason to eat animals for our nourishment".

You have said there needs to be a universal declaration of animal rights to accommodate a complete picture of what it means to fight for animals rights.  Tell us about that please.

This is something I spoke about to many members of the animal rights groups that we should be doing.  Not only a constitution,  but a Declaration of Independence for animal rights.  Get all of the so-called leaders of the animal rights movement to speak for 2 or 3 minutes each, then get a brilliant writer, not unlike Thomas Jefferson who wrote our own Declaration of Independence, to draft up those documents.

Wouldn't be just be better and quicker  to attract 'new blood' to the movement. Activists who won't sell out?

We have a combination of the old guard and the 'new blood' in place at present.  These are really good people but many have lost their direction.   Many of the self-appointed leaders of the movement cry for the animals, have their hearts is in the right place, but again, they are declaring victories for animals when in reality there are no victories to be found. 

We have lost sight that it's all about the animals. It's not about us.   Each thing we do, we have to imagine the animals are watching us and judging us.  We have to be true to them, not give way to our motives and allow our own desires to grow stronger.  It's for them.

The Dairy Industry has sold consumers two seemingly unshakable myths.  First, that milk is good for them and second, that the industry itself works to ancient natural laws.  Is milk fit for human consumption?

Every sip of milk has virus, pus and bacteria in it.  Every sip of milk has powerful growth hormones, proteins that cause allergies, antibiotics, pesticides, cholesterol, and dioxins.  You don't want any of those things in your body.  It's all about hormones.  You would not drink dog's, cat's or pig's milk.  Instinctively we know as adults not to drink breast milk.  Yet from the cow we drink powerful steroid hormones and Bovine Growth Hormone (BST).  These do not do our body any good.

In America we genetically engineer that hormone so we inject it back into cows to produce more milk.   The greatest miracle of Nature is that there is another hormone in nature that cows have called Insulin Growth Factor (IGF1).  Out of the hundreds and millions of choice factors, the IGF1 is the only one that's identical between two species - the human and the cow. We should not be drinking milk.  We should not be taking in these powerful growth hormones and that's what milk is now. It's a hormonal delivery system.

Scientists have made cows into milking machines.   In their research they have found out that a cow's pituitary gland contains a hormone that drives maternal behaviour.  This hormone is extracted from cow's brains at slaughter-time and is administered to pregnant women as oxytocin to induce labour. What's your opinion about all this tampering with Nature?

In India oxytocin is brought at some of the same places cigarettes are brought from. They inject the cows to induce more milk.   When little girls drink cow's milk they are in fact taking daily doses of oxytocin,  prolactin inhibitory factor, melatonin and steroid hormones like progesterone and estrogen. A human women in her natural life produces only about a teaspoonful of estrogen.  You do not want to be eating that everyday from cow's milk.  In cheese,  this factor is concentrated 10 to 20 times over.

If some animals are afforded their 'rights' down the track, will a twisted logic run counter to that stating:  'Now these non-human animals are our equals (by law) there is no longer any excuse not to cross-breed species with them in a world striving to be non-speciesistic?'

When we change things and think we are God, then sometimes mistakes are made.   Now we're seeing evidence of many, many of these mistakes happening in the world today.   The singer, Bob Dylan said, "The answer my friend is blowing in the wind", because the wind takes many of these genetically engineered pollens and spreads them to plants that weren't intended to be changed.   We see mixtures of animals where different unknown characteristics occur.  This could actually represent a biohazard.

Last year I closed down Monsanto's European factory through much of my activism that is based in America. By accident I learnt that Monsanto had created a new strain of antibiotic resistance bacterium including staphylococcus aurus that plagues America's hospitals.  There's no cure for this.   By accident they created this new species of creature and this is something we have to all be aware has happened and may happen again.   Monsanto made unanticipated mistakes when they genetically engineered the Bovine Growth Hormone (BST).  I discovered that they created what Monsanto scientists call "freak amino acids".

The Dairy Industry spends millions of dollars a year trying to convince us we can't live without our 2 glasses of pasteurised homogenised milk each day.  The kind of material you are citing on your website must be a threat to them.  Has the Dairy Board tried to shut you up?

The American Dairy magazine "Hoards Dairymen" published the fact that 40 people are working to try and counter my work which makes me very proud I'm employing 40 families full-time.  They spend a few hundred million a year to lie to Americans to tell them to drink a product that's not good for them.  There is not one nutritional reason why people should be drinking cow's milk.  The 2005 March issue of the journal "Pediatrics" tells us there is no nutritional need for milk.  It does not help to build strong bones. As a matter of fact, it does just the opposite.

Each cow in the EU is subsidised  $2.50 a day.  That's more than what 75% of Africans have to live on. (1)   How heavily subsidised is the Dairy Industry in America?

It used to be zero.  Now it's subsidised by hundreds of millions of dollars.  I have actually researched the political aspects of the milk industry.  E.g., On March 23, 1971 Watergate's President Richard Nixon took a $3 million dollar bribe and the next day raised the price of milk to $300 million dollars.  By making a Freedom of Information Act request I actually have the tape of that.  There's a lot of political considerations going on.  Our own regulatory agency, the US Department of Agriculture, is filled with people who have ties or who have worked in the Dairy Industry.  So American consumers are not really getting a fair shake.  It's up to us to take back our health.

Can you talk about milk and animal violence please.  Tell us how vital mother's first milk (colostrum) is for a bobby calf?

A calf must receive at least 2-3 quarts of colostrum within an hour after birth, or that calf will not live more than 3-4 weeks.   At birth the calf is also separated from her mother.  The mother and the child both cry for 3-4 weeks.  To live on a dairy farm and witness this tremendous pain on both creatures is to understand they are feeling animals.  They are sentient beings.  Whether its human or nonhuman,  nobody likes to live in slavery.  Nobody likes to be separated from Mom.  Nobody likes to be put on a truck and be driven 8 hours in the middle of the night, sometimes having your body frozen to the side of the truck, to be taken to an auction house, where you are prodded with a sharp stick and then sent to a slaughterhouse where your throat is cut.  The mother cow wakes up sometimes, gurgling on her own blood.  Nobody likes that experience.  Not human.  Not cow.   It's a painful thing to understand what these creatures go through but understand it we must.   The most horrible aspect to the farm industry is what happens to cows.

It's difficult to capture pain on film and the kind of crippling pain cows are subjected to after being forced to stand on cold hard concrete in intensive factory farms for hours on end.  In one survey alone it's been stated that 20% of cows go lame because of the weight and discomfort of their swollen udders preventing  them from standing or walking properly.  The excessive milk yield itself is a cruelty factor.

That's right.   A few years ago an average cow's yield was one litre of milk per day.   Today it's somewhere nearer 30 litres per day.   You know,  I strongly believe in animal rights but I also strongly believe in peoples' rights.   When we eat these animals and drink their diseased body fluids, we are not doing any good to our own body.

Do you think the Dairy Industry's PR machine set out to position the public's mind against the health benefits of soy milk, keeping in mind a lot of soya beans these days are genetically engineered?

An apple a day, keeps the doctor away.  We know that apples are filled with wonderful substances and so is broccoli and carrots.  There is 12 major categories of these isoflavones.  The only thing to have more than 2 is soy which has 6 categories.   I think soy is the healthiest product however the way it's processed is very unhealthy.  When they add artificial thickeners like caroteine this is the same substance they use to de-ice aeroplane wings with.    Many people get sick from soy and blame it on the soy but the artificial emulsifiers is really to blame. I know there's a lot of misinformation regarding soy so I'm willing to step forward and have my say on the subject. The dairy industry was at first very against soy in America.  Now they own and control the soy industry.  They are not so stupid after all.

There's a great divergency of thought as to how the animal rights movement might proceed, say, in the next 10 years, though there seems to be a general agreement that the direction and character which the movement assumes now will be critical to its success or survival in the future.

The great irony is: The ones making the changes for us will be the abuse industry.  The money markets will dictate the terms. The dairy industry here now owns the soy industry and has learnt that it takes 30 pennies to fill a litre of milk and yet it takes about half a penny to fill that same litre with soy milk.  So, they are the ones who'll be making the changes because that's where the profits lie.  I'm going to push it along myself as I think the time has come for people of the world to see the violence by which animals have to give their lives to us to eat.  There are so many alternatives and they need to be recognised by a wider audience and our job as animal activists is to educate them on how to do this.

Reference:

Williams, Jessica.2004. 50 Facts that Should Change the World. Icon Books UK.

See Robery Cohen's website for further info:   www.notmilk.com

Click Here to read the first part of this interview:
A Conversation with Robert Cohen aka NOTMILKMAN: Part One

Click Here to read Margaret Setter's Review of Robert Cohen's Book:
Milk: The Deadly Posion