Sour Vegans: Drink Breast Milk, Not Cow’s Milk

The recent anti-milk speech at the Oscars from Joaquin Phoenix has apparently started an obnoxious trend. At a Bernie Sanders rally last weekend, the ragtag group Direct Action Everywhere (DxE) stormed the stage, with one activist grabbing the microphone to bash the dairy industry, while two topless women poured bloody liquid on themselves.

Hating on milk is a bizarre cause. Even vegetarians still consume dairy products. But let’s indulge them for a moment. What would we do without cow’s milk and the products it helps make: Ice cream, cheese, and milk chocolate, to name a few?

Vegans have a solution. PETA has, in true PETA form, called on Ben and Jerry’s to start using human breast milk in its ice cream instead of cow’s milk. (We didn’t say they had a good solution.)

Vegans claim that we should stick to human breast milk because we are the only species that drinks another species’ milk. So what? We’re the only species that does a lot of things. Humans are also the only species that creates Sistine Chapels and builds spaceships. We’re unique. The fact that we have moral and legal codes—including the moral and legal obligation to treat dairy cows and other animals humanely—is unique. There’s no moral code for animal welfare in nature, where wolves rip calves to shreds.

But back to DxE and its anti-milk activism. Two DxE activists in Australia were on trial this week for stealing a calf from a dairy farm and taking it to a sanctuary. According to coverage of the trial, a secretly recorded call produced by the prosecution indicates that the activists made up a claim about the calf being sick, coming up with this pretense after they learned police were closing in on them. (They were convicted.)

Just because vegan activists say something, doesn’t mean it’s true. That’s a good rule to live by when dealing with the breast milk brigade.