Former ‘Slaughter-Free Dairy’ Farmer: No Such Thing As Humane Dairy

Andrea Davis: Goat mother and baby at Broken Shovels Farm Sanctuary. (Source Andrea Davis, Free from Harm)

Source Free from Harm
By Free From Harm Staff Writers

With more and more consumers ditching dairy after learning about the many cruel practices involved— including the slaughter of male calves as well as the killing of young mother cows once their milk production declines— a segment of the niche “humane” dairy sector is working to popularize the notion of “slaughter-free dairy.”

Perhaps the most well known “slaughter-free dairy” label currently operating is the UK-based Ahimsa Dairy, a Hare Krishna initiative in which male calves are not killed but are used for forced labor once they are old enough, and female cows are “retired” to pasture after years of being milked. Ahimsa Dairy has offered slaughter-free milk and cheese to customers in London since 2011, and the movement is slowly spreading in the US. The offshoot Gita Nagari Creamery, in Pennsylvania sells its slaughter-free milk for $10 a gallon, which includes a $2.50 cow “retirement fee” and $1.50 for “boy calf care.”

In addition to still being inherently exploitative, this and other models of slaughter-free dairy pose significant and unavoidable environmental, animal welfare, and scalability problems, which we’ve explored in depth previously here. Below, please find a first person perspective from former slaughter-free dairy farmer and cheesemaker turned vegan, Andrea Davis.

Andrea had a change of heart after recognizing that her work, like all dairy farming, depended on bringing more and more babies into the world, and breaking up families with lifelong bonds, all to satisfy a taste for mother’s milk stolen from other animals. She went vegan and in 2017, transitioned her farm into an animal sanctuary and vegan education center.  (Read the full story of her change of heart, here.) Andrea writes:

We still get asked, often, why we decided to ditch dairy when no one was being killed in order for us to produce it. Here is one of several reasons this was a choice I had to make.

As a mother myself, I could not overlook parallels I could clearly see between myself and animal parents. Because running a dairy meant needing animals to become mothers year after year, there was always a sad, painful separation of families at some point. Although mother goats on our farm raised their own newborn babies, we had to separate them after weaning and rehome the kids in order to ensure we weren’t eventually overrun with goats.

I often see dairy farmers defend the practice of removing babies from mothers...

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