This Mother’s Day, while we celebrate the women we love, the dairy and veal industries are doing what they do every other day of the year – tearing new-borns from their mothers and sending them to die in the dark.
Somewhere, right now, a woman is opening a card her child made at school — wobbly handwriting, a crayon sun, the word “Mum” spelled with such effort it warms your heart. Somewhere, a daughter is taking her mum to brunch. Flowers are being bought. Phone calls are being made across time zones. The country is, in its particular British way, doing its annual collective reckoning with the idea of motherhood – the sacrifice of it, the ferocity of it, the love that runs deep.
And somewhere, in a shed on a farm you have probably driven past without looking, a dairy cow is standing in silence. She has been standing in silence for three days. Her calf was taken from her within hours of birth. She called for him until she couldn’t anymore.
He was male. He was, in the language of the industry that created him, a by-product. A waste product, more precisely. The dairy industry needed his mother’s milk. It did not need him. And so, he was separated, registered, tagged, and sent down a road that ends, within weeks or months, in slaughter – his flesh pale from deliberate deprivation, his brief life spent in conditions designed to keep him as still and as close to anaemic as the law permits.
They call this veal. It should be called depravity.
The Heartbroken Mother
Her name, if we were willing to give her one, might be something ordinary, but let’s call her by what she is – a mother.
She is a Holstein-Friesian, the dominant dairy breed in the UK. She has been engineered over generations to produce quantities of milk so extreme that her body is under near-constant physiological strain. She produces, on average, 22 litres a day. In peak lactation, some cows produce 60. She does this not because she is generous, but because her body has been selectively redesigned to do it, and because she is, like every dairy cow, kept in a perpetual cycle of pregnancy and loss.
To produce milk, she must give birth. So, she is artificially inseminated – restrained in what the industry calls a ‘cattle crush’, more honestly called a ‘rape rack’. She carries her calf for nine months, just as a human woman does. When she gives birth, there is a brief window – often measured in hours – before her calf is forcibly removed. Farmers will tell you this is done quickly because it is kinder that way – the bond, they say, hasn’t fully formed.
Research does not support this. Cows form attachment to their calves immediately. They lick them. They nuzzle them. The calls a mother cow makes when her calf is taken – a deep, guttural lowing farmers describe without apparent emotion as simply ‘part of the process’ – have been studied by animal behaviourists who classify them as expressions of acute distress. The calling can last for days. Some cows break through fences to try to find their new-borns. Others stop eating.
The calf, meanwhile, is in another pen. He is hungry. He is disoriented. He has arrived in the world and found, in place of a mother’s body and warmth and milk, a metal bar to suck on.
This is not an aberration. This is the system working exactly as designed.
The Abused Calf
If he is destined for the veal industry – as tens of thousands of British male dairy calves are – his life will unfold in a space designed not for his wellbeing but for the management of his flesh. Traditional white veal, the kind still produced across much of the EU and consumed in British restaurants and bistros, is made through a process that reads, in the dry language of science, as ‘deliberate iron deficiency’. In plain language – the calves are kept anaemic on purpose.
The veal market demands pale flesh – almost white, soft and delicate, it is infant tissue. And so, the calves are fed exclusively on milk substitute, kept in stalls or group pens where movement is severely restricted, and denied access to grass, straw, or any solid food that might introduce iron into their bloodstream.
They grow weak. Their immune systems are compromised. They develop what researchers call ‘stereotypic behaviours’ – the neurological tics that emerge when a social, curious, active animal is left with nothing to do and nowhere to go. They tongue-roll. They suck on metal bars. They bite their enclosures. In group pens, they mouth the ears and navels of the other calves they cannot help but press against in the limited space. This is not aggression. It is the calf’s body trying, desperately and pointlessly, to perform the act of suckling that it was separated from before it ever got to do it properly.
They live like this for somewhere between eight weeks and a few months. Then they are loaded onto lorries and sent to slaughter.
The journey – sometimes across international borders, hours, or days long, is for an already weakened, already terrified young animal, a particular kind of cruelty. Calves transported at a week old are described by welfare researchers as hungry, exhausted, and especially vulnerable to disease. Many do not arrive in the condition they left. Some do not arrive at all.
Selective Feminism
A female reproductive system, commandeered without her consent, cycled and milked and drained until she is spent, and then killed. Her children, taken. Her grief, irrelevant. Her body, a resource.
If this sounds like something feminism ought to care about, that’s because it is.
Feminism has, throughout its history, had a complicated relationship with those that count.
The suffragette movement that won women the vote in Britain was a movement that largely fought for the rights of white, middle-class women and was, in many cases, explicitly hostile to the idea that its principles might extend to non-white women, working-class women, or women outside its cultural imagination. The suffragettes who chained themselves to railings outside Parliament were not chaining themselves on behalf of the women of colonised India or Ireland, whose oppression the British state was actively administering at the same moment. The movement had a circle of concern, and it was drawn tightly.
This is not ancient history. Second-wave feminism – the movement of the 1960s and 70s that reshaped law, politics, and culture, was challenged within its own ranks for the same failure. Black feminists like Audre Lorde and bell hooks were documenting, at the height of the movement’s influence, the way that mainstream feminism’s analysis of women’s oppression was built on the experience of white women and either ignored or actively erased the specific experiences of Black women, women of colour, queer women, disabled women, women at the intersection of multiple marginalised identities. The phrase ‘intersectionality,’ coined by legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989, gave a name to what many women had been saying for decades – that liberation is not divisible. That a feminism which frees some women while leaving others in bondage is not feminism. It is the management of privilege.
And so, the hope was – and remains – that the circle is re-drawn.
Distancing Ourselves by Refusing to See
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Three men surround and violently de-bud a days old calf. She collapses after the painful male-on-female brutality. Screengrab from a hidden camera. (Image – Animal Justice Project)
Each expansion of feminist concern has met resistance from those who preferred the smaller circle. When disability rights activists pushed feminism to account for bodily autonomy in the context of ableism, they were told they were diluting the message. When trans women demanded inclusion, they were told the same. When ecofeminists began connecting the exploitation of female bodies to the exploitation of the natural world – including the bodies of female non-human animals – they were told they were going too far, that comparing women to animals was an insult, that the category error was too great.
But the ecofeminists were not saying women are animals. They were saying that the logic used to dominate women is the same logic used to dominate animals. That patriarchy and speciesism are not separate systems but expressions of the same fundamental belief – that some bodies exist to be used by others, that reproduction is a resource to be managed, that those who cannot speak in the dominant language have no rights worth honouring.
Why has mainstream feminism been so reluctant to make this connection? The easy answer is discomfort – that extending solidarity to non-human animals requires giving up things (meat, dairy, leather, fur) that many feminists have not been prepared to give up, and that it is uncomfortable to have your choices interrogated by your own values. The harder answer involves those whom mainstream feminism has historically centred – educated, urban, predominantly white women whose relationship to the land and to animal agriculture is one of comfortable distance. Milk arrives in bottles. Veal arrives on plates. The cow is somewhere else, in a shed, calling for a calf that is also somewhere else.
Distance is the engine of almost all moral failure. We do not do to what we can see, what we do to what we cannot see.
It is not coincidental that the communities most likely to be working in slaughterhouses, most likely to be living near industrial animal agriculture, most likely to be breathing the air and drinking the water downstream of it, are disproportionately communities of colour, migrant communities, communities already marginalised by the same economic systems that profit from cheap animal protein. A feminism serious about intersectionality cannot be indifferent to this. The oppression of female animals, the exploitation of human workers in industrial animal agriculture, and the environmental degradation borne disproportionately by already-marginalised communities are not separate issues sitting in separate folders. They are the same system, moving in the same direction.
Veal is Not Humane
A week ago, on International Women’s Day, a small group of women stood outside the Tate Modern in the grey London morning. They held a sign – “Veal is NOT Human(e)”. They did not shout. They stood.
The installation was conceived and organised by Stephanie Lane, founder of SPECIESISM.WTF, an organisation built on the belief that art can do what argument alone cannot — that the body, made visible, can force a recognition that statistics and rhetoric deflect. Lane, a finalist for the Women In Art Prize UK 2024, has been staging performances across the world since 2023 – fourteen UK cities, New York, Mumbai, Berlin. Each time, the same silent logic, the same invitation to connect the dots.
At an installation in Bristol called ‘Acts of Creation: On Art and Motherhood,’ a participant wrote about watching mothers arrive with their children for an early Mother’s Day celebration, and thinking about calves being stripped from their own mothers. The cognitive dissonance was, she said, almost unbearable.
Almost is Where Most of Us Live
Moving on from ‘almost,’ is not about reform. It isn’t about asking for better conditions or more humane slaughter. It is asking for abolition – the end of a system that treats female animals as reproductive machines and their offspring as disposable product. We don’t need better management of oppression – we need it to end.
The poet writing as @foodwithoutfacespoet, puts the challenge to feminism with a directness that is hard to argue with – “To really be feminist means to be vegan too.” Not because veganism is a dietary preference. But because the dairy industry is, structurally, the subjugation of female reproductive systems at industrial scale. Because the veal industry is what happens to the young that the system produces but cannot use. Because every carton of milk and every plate of veal is held in place by the same logic that feminism – at its most honest, at its most principled, in its best moments – exists to dismantle.
This Mother’s Day, as the cards are opened and the flowers are placed in water and someone’s mum laughs at something her children said, somewhere a dairy cow is standing in a shed, and somewhere a male dairy calf is in a pen, pressing his nose against a metal bar, trying to find what he lost before he ever fully had it.
They are not asking for our sympathy. They do not know we exist. But we know they exist. That, in the end, is what makes this a moral question rather than a sentimental one.
We know. We have always known. The question is what we decide to do with that knowledge.
— © 2026 Sul Nowroz – Real Media staff writer – Insta: @TheAfghanWriter
