Do cows really benefit when milk is offered?
I’ve recently read some interesting remarks by devotees who are anti-vegan. Now, I can understand why a devotee (or any vegetarian) doesn’t go vegan. It’s their choice and that’s fine with me. And morally, I have zero objection to a farmer taking cows milk if the cows are not harmed or killed. But what I cannot wrap my head around is how people, especially devotees who love cows very much, can be anti-vegan.
The vast majority of the vegans that I know are vegan for moral reasons. They don’t like how the dairy industry is the veal (and meat) industry. They go hand-in-hand. The only exception is farms that do not slaughter their cows. Those exceptions are sadly very few and far between.
One of the biggest arguments I hear from anti-vegan devotees is that the cows make spiritual advancement when their milk is offered. That scenario would be wonderful. If a happy devotee farmer raised happy cows and their milk was used in offerings, then sure, it would make little sense to be vegan. But that’s not the case. The cows are horribly abused and then slaughtered and it’s all funded by the money used to buy milk.
Thousands of cows contribute their milk to every carton purchased in a store. So how does that work out in the way of spiritual advancement? Do all of the many thousands of cows receive advancement? If one cow’s milk is more plentiful in the carton, is that cow more spiritually benefited? If so, the inhumane, brutal dairy industry would be the best thing that ever happened to the cows. That’s a very tough pill to swallow.
So I’m asking: Where is the sastric evidence that cows are spiritually benefited when their milk is used? If Srila Prabhupada said it, where did he get it?
Other arguments such as “vegans can’t get certain health benefits elsewhere” are simply not true. The big two are calcium (which can be obtained from a variety of beans, greens and nuts) and B12, which is where the “finer brain tissue” idea came from. B12 is easily obtainable in nutritional yeast. Your body doesn’t need much of it.
I’m not on some campaign to convert milk drinking devotees into vegan devotees. You have chosen what is best for you and I’ve chosen what is best for me.
But the argument that cows are spiritual benefited when their milk is offered needs to be proven with sastra.
