It’s late, but I don’t see any reason why the Cow Ribbon Campaign should be a one day event. After all, if you really love your mother, you don’t just be nice to her one day a year. I’m going to keep my own words brief, and include the press release about this amazing campaign below, because the originators of the event say it best.

I will just ask that readers pay special attention to what Glenn says about the unavoidable cruelty even on “happy” organic farms. Cows, like human women, don’t just gush milk from their breasts. They, like human women, must bear a child in order to inspire their breasts to generate and give milk. And so, dairy cows are forcibly impregnated (yes, even on organic farms), which in human terms we call rape, so that they bear children.

But of course they can’t KEEP their children, because then the calves would drink all that milk we want for ourselves. So, the mothers are torn from their children the same day they are born. We would hear that sound in Maryland, living as we did just down the road from a small dairy operation. The crying went on for days; terrible, anguished, lonely crying.

And what happens to the babies? Female calves are eligible to enter the dairy industry themselves — including the organic milk industry — and so they are raised on formula. Male calves are almost useless, thanks to lowering veal consumption. So they are generally discarded (literally, as in thrown out like trash) unless they can miraculously be sold to a veal outfit or to folks who think it would be nice to have a cow in their backyard.

Yes, this happens on organic farms. How could it not? These are businesses. Their product is milk.  There is only one way to make cow’s milk, and only one way to get it: by raping and stealing from adult women of another species. Vermont is rife with images of happy, contented cows grazing on small family dairy farms (the darling child of the state). Every time we see one of them (the last time, in the “Activist Attic” in Brattleboro, an otherwise progressive place), we choke in disgust.

Buy a Cow Ribbon and support the Cow Ribbon Campaign every day. Because every day, millions of mothers are torn from their children so humans can steal their breast milk.

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Wear a Cow Ribbon for Mother’s Day and expose the cruel dairy industry, animal activists say.