Beasts of Burden: Animal and Disability Liberation

by Sunaura Taylor

But as Woodstock Farm Sanctuary founder Jenny Brown so unappetizingly points out in her book The Lucky Ones, doing things “naturally” is often a far more complex task than many omnivores think. First a worker “milks” the semen out of a bull—meaning he or she masturbates him. Then, the dairy farmer who purchased that semen pushes his arm up a cow’s vagina to artificially inseminate her. A calf begins to grow, and eventually the cow’s body begins to manufacture a food suited perfectly to that calf. . . . But instead of having her calf’s mouth on them, the mother’s teats are fitted with synthetic-lined metal cups. Her milk is sucked through tubes into a large vat. Because her teats are clamped repeatedly by a machine . . . she endures painful chafing and mastitis—an infection in her udder—which often leads to pus draining into the milk. Meanwhile, the cow has most likely been administered hormones and genetically manipulated so that she will produce up to ten times the amount of milk she would produce naturally. As a result, her body is under constant stress, and she is at risk for numerous health problems, which causes the farmer to add antibiotics to this “natural” cocktail. Then, instead of nourishing a newborn, that milk is taken to factories where it is separated, analyzed for fat content, pasteurized to destroy enzymes and microorganisms, sucked into an electric churn via a plate heat exchanger, separated again, and churned again. . . . Viola! “Natural” but...