Stephanie Lane, interdisciplinary artist, animal rights activist and founder of SPECIESISM.WTF participatory performance, took to the streets of London to challenge animal exploitation while exposing the violent realities of the dairy industry.
On Saturday October 18, a powerful moving art installation called The Milking Herd toured central London, staging a series of performative stops that exposed the brutal realities hidden behind the dairy industry. The piece—organised and promoted by the collective SPECIESISM.WTF—used human performers and sculptural elements to recreate the visual language of a herd on the move, forcing passers-by to confront the exploitation of commodified maternal bodies that underpins every glass of milk.
Performance and Public Interaction
The collective’s Instagram channel shows The Milking Herd moving through some of the city’s most popular public spaces, strategically placing the work where civic attention, tourism and media converge. Photographs and short videos on the account record procession scenes outside Buckingham Palace and the National Gallery in Trafalgar Square, where the juxtaposition of classical art and live protest generated stark contrast. Busy pedestrian corridors and transport hubs were deliberately chosen to maximize public encounter and disrupt the comfortable narrative that shields consumers from the violence their dairy purchases fund.
The installation combined choreographed movement, with 45 women embodying milked commodities, moving through the city as living sculptures, with sound and costumes that depicted the brutality of the dairy industry. Onlookers were offered leaflets and photographic material that connected the visceral imagery on the street to documented facts about industrial dairy practices, prompting debate among residents and tourists. Visual language was designed to pierce through defensive rationalisations and generate empathy for the sentient beings whose suffering society has been conditioned to ignore.
The Biological Absurdity of Cross-Species Milk Consumption
Humans are the only species who systematically exploit and consume the maternal secretions of another species—a practice that is neither natural nor necessary for human health. Milk evolved as a targeted nutritional system to feed the newborns of each specific species until weaning. Human consumption of cow’s milk depends entirely on an exploitative system that violates the biological purpose of lactation, treating a physiological process designed for calves as an endless commodity stream for humans to profit from.
All mammals undergo natural weaning – it is biologically normal for mammals to stop consuming milk once they can digest solid food. The fact human populations evolved lactase persistence does not morally justify an industry where cows are involuntarily impregnated, systematically separated from their young, and enslaved for life.
Ashleigh, an expectant mother, and member of Saturday’s herd shared her reasons for participating:
“Pregnant cows are not seen as expectant mothers like me. They are nothing more than stock, used to make money. From birth, their bodily autonomy is never their own. They don’t have a choice on whether or when to have a child – those decisions are forced upon them. Having given birth, mother cows have their child torn away from them, sometimes within hours. I’d like expectant and existing human mothers to consider that pain, even just for a moment, really put yourself in their place. That’s why I am here.”
The Industry Model: Institutionalised Cruelty
Evolution has given humans a capacity for violence and tribalism—but adaptations do not release us from our moral obligations.
Modern farming systematically transforms sentient beings into biological machines through cycles of forced impregnation, grief-inducing family separation, and genetic manipulation for maximum exploitation. Dairy cows are artificially inseminated repeatedly—often annually—to maintain continuous milk production, mimicking a state of perpetual pregnancy and lactation that would never occur naturally. Their calves are typically removed within hours of birth, causing documented distress behaviours in both mothers and offspring. Cows bellow for days searching for their missing young, while calves display acute stress responses from maternal deprivation.
Male calves, worthless to the dairy industry, are either killed shortly after birth or sold into veal production. Female calves face the same fate as their mothers – repeated impregnation, industrial-scale lactation, and eventual slaughter when their milk production declines, typically at a fraction of their natural lifespan. Investigations repeatedly document violence, systematic neglect, severe overcrowding, mastitis infections, lameness from concrete floors and genetic manipulation, as well as painful procedures such as de-horning and tail-docking performed without adequate anaesthesia. This cruelty is not aberrational—it is inherent to an industry that treats living beings as production units.
Environmental Devastation and Public Health Concerns
The dairy industry represents an ecological disaster, contributing massively to climate change through methane emissions from enteric fermentation, generating water pollution through manure runoff which creates dead zones in waterways. Dairy farms consume vast quantities of freshwater in water-stressed regions, and require extensive land use that drives deforestation and habitat destruction. Farm accidents involving manure spills and waste lagoon breaches have led to prosecutions across multiple jurisdictions, yet regulators consistently fail to hold the industry accountable for its environmental crimes.
Public health evidence increasingly contradicts industry propaganda. Dairy consumption is simply not essential for bone health or overall nutrition, and many communities thrive on dairy-free diets. Meanwhile, dairy products are linked to increased risks of certain cancers, cardiovascular disease, and inflammatory conditions. A well-planned plant-based diet easily meets all human nutritional requirements without requiring the exploitation of other species.
Abundant, Superior Alternatives
A wide and growing range of plant-based milks comprehensively replace cow’s milk for all culinary purposes—drinking, cooking, baking —without requiring animal suffering. Oat, almond, soy and coconut milks all offer distinct flavours, textures, and nutritional profiles. Many of these plant-based milks are fortified with calcium and vitamins that match or exceed the micronutrient profile associated with dairy, while providing significantly lower saturated fat, zero cholesterol, and no lactose. These alternatives provide a pathway to eliminate the ethical violence inherent in dairy production.
Art as Social Change
“Eighty-two percent of the population do not know calves are separated from their mothers within 24 hours of birth so that we can steal their milk. Few people know that farmers kill most baby male calves. That’s not right so we’re trying to educate people,” said Susan Clarke, of SPECIESISM.WTF.
Susan continued: “SPECIESISM.WTF aims to encourage its audience to look into the horrors of animal farming practices and the way we disregard the impact of our diets on other species. The Milking Herd is the biggest of our art installations, and performances of Stephanie’s art have been carried out in venues across the world. The misuse of other species is a global issue.
By accompanying the visual presentation with an ironic speech mirroring farm publicity but applying it to humans, the installations create a meaningful expose. We put humans in the position of animals to create empathy”.
Rupturing Speciesism
The 2025 Milking Herd action builds directly on a signature project from 2023, when a Milking Herd installation first mobilised public spaces to challenge speciesism and the harmful normalisation of dairy consumption. The earlier iteration received widespread attention for its confrontational use of human bodies and live performance to simulate the violent routines of dairy farms.
The dairy industry depends on practices that inflict systematic suffering on cows and calves, and appropriate a biological process which was meant for infant calves, into a commodity for humans. Drinking animal milk is a cultural habit rather than a biological necessity, and the abundant availability of plant-based alternatives means there is no longer any justification for supporting this industry.
SPECIESISM.WTF founder Stephanie Lane summed up the cultural relevance of The Milking Herd:
“For me, every move and breath is art and with that comes responsibility. My purpose, is to rupture, not entertain; to expose the hidden economy of suffering our culture normalises, and even glamorises. The Milking Herd confronts the brutality of the dairy industry, dismantling the lie of disposability. Legacy, for me, is not reputation, it is leaving a fracture in our species’ delusion of supremacy.”
— © 2025 Sul Nowroz – Real Media staff writer – Insta: @TheAfghanWriter
