Praise the oat drink

I am loving the Marks and Spencer oat drink. I only just discovered it and it’s delicious! After having consumed soya drink for more than 15 years I’m now an oat drink convert.

We’re not supposed to call it milk because the EU ruled that non-diary substitutes cannot be called milk. I’m quite happy about this because milk is a mammalian secretion for infants. It’s not a drink for adults of another species. We all drank our mother’s milk when we were babies but some of us, it seems, were never weaned and continue to drink milk from other mothers as adults.

Sometimes people ask me why I avoid dairy products when milking cows does not kill them. That’s simply not true. Their babies are killed. Dairy cows are forced to give birth every 18 months or so and their babies are taken from them at birth and killed. Some of the female babies might join the herd but the males are a byproduct of the industry.

Cows get distressed when their babies are taken from them. There’s a device farmers can buy that is fitted to the nose of calves to prevent them from nursing and, in the words of the supplier, “effectively reducing the bond between mother and young!”. I kid you not. It really does say that. Further down on the same site it says:

After calves have worn the anti-sucking device for a few (4-7) days, remove the nose-flaps and separate cows and calves as you would normally only now, without all the usual uproar! Calves bawl less, spend less time walking in search of mom, and spend more time eating.

Even the industry admits that calves “bawl” for their mothers. They are not robots without the capacity to suffer and feel pain and yet this is how we treat them. They experience pain and suffering just as we do and it’s unethical for us to ignore that. There’s really  no reason to consume dairy products when there are so many healthy alternatives. The alternatives are also better for the environment.