Earth Day Blues: Cows and Sows are Mamas, Too

God requires that we assist the animals, when they need our help. Each being (human or creature) has the same right of protection. 

–St. Francis of Assisi

“One piece of advice: get a breast pump,” said my graduate school professor. That’s one of those things only a woman can say to another. We were side-by-side on exercise bikes, and I was five months pregnant.

Four months later, I did use a breast-pump to keep my son fed as I finished the academic year. But it was a bit awkward. I said to another new mother, “I feel like a cow with that thing on.” I identified with a mere cow and felt silly.

But with that thought came the seed of the notion that the cow might feel as deep an attachment to her calves as I did to my baby. I started to connect the dots: I’m a mammal, too.

And maybe–just maybe–the cow’s feelings about her calf matter as much as my feelings about my baby do. 

Feminist Distance

I’d been a feminist since college. So I eventually asked myself, Is it okay to identify with an animal when women are still called sows, cows, and bitches? 

Intersectionality emphasizes the cross-influences of oppression, and ecofeminists embrace our ethical responsibility to combat speciesism.  But many other mainstream feminists fear that if women are compared to animals, there will be one more reason to see women as inferior to men. So they keep their distance.

But animals of other species and human women are indeed connected. The same cold, objectifying disdain that leads to human-on-human abuse pervades dairy, pig and egg-laying operations.

It is the stance of emotional distance which leads to the mistreatment of animals, children, and humans of all ages, races, genders and abilities. Emotional identification is the pathway to moral change for all of us.

Anthropodenial

A few years after my breast pump epiphany, I would take my 4-year-old son to the local agricultural fair, and meet up with a cow for the first time. It struck me that the cow appeared unhappy. I tried to suppress the thought; I wanted to believe the pastoral pictures of peaceful cows in fields on the milk cartons. But I couldn’t help how looking in her eyes made me feel. 

Ethologist Mark Bekoff writes of a now-established axiom in the study of non-human species:

Do animals have emotions? Of course they do. Just look at them, listen to them, and if you dare, smell the odors that pour out when they interact with friends and foes. Look at their faces, tails, bodies, and most importantly, dare to look into their eyes.

Given that, I appreciate this term invented by animal psychologist, Frans DeWaal: anthropodenial. Because often as not, humans assume that other animals do not have the same emotions we do, even when we recognize a feeling in their eyes. We think we are only projecting. But as DeWaal says our resistance often “hides a pre-Darwinian mindset, one uncomfortable with the notion of humans as animals.” 

And uncomfortable with humans as mammals. 

Mother-Grief

My second son needs to drink raw milk from grass-fed cows to strengthen his teeth, so we drive half an hour once a week to a small farm that tests their milk monthly. The first time I looked into the brown, long-lashed eyes of those cows, I knew for sure that the first one I’d met at the agricultural fair was sad and nervous. Because these cows were some of the most peaceful, sweetest, content creatures I’d ever met.

What was different? It turned out that the farmer, Christine, allows the cows to nurse their babies every morning. She milks the cows in the evening for people in the community. This is a very different situation than even your average small organic dairy farm.

At most dairy operations, the calf is taken from its mother immediately after birth to avoid bonding. But as Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, the author of The Face on Your Plate, writes, “…they have already bonded, just as much as would a human mother with her baby. The strong bond is inborn in all mammals.”

Moussaieff Masson quotes Temple Grandin, world-renown animal science expert, who visited a dairy farm on the day the mothers and calves were separated. Grandin saw one cow wandering around, bellowing, and said, “‘That’s one sad, unhappy, upset cow. She wants her baby. Bellowing for it, hunting for it. She’ll forget for a while, and then start again. It’s like grieving, mourning–not much written about it. People don’t like to allow them thoughts or feelings.’”

And what about the feelings of the babies? Farmsanctuary.org writes, “After being taken from their mother, calves’ cries can be so intense that their throats become irritated.”

Do Feelings Matter?

Do the feelings of non-human animals matter? Bekoff writes, “There’s no doubt whatsoever that, when it comes to what we can and cannot do to other animals, it’s their emotions that should inform our discussions and our actions on their behalf.” 

That’s in contrast to some animal rights philosophers who focus only on reason in their arguments. However, there’s no need to dichotomize. As eco-feminist Lori Gruen says, “One way to overcome the false dualism between reason and emotion is by moving out of the realm of abstraction and getting closer to the effects of our everyday actions.”

Just Another Female

It is not easy to face the effects of our every day actions on other mammals and animals that we eat. 

But a look into the meat industry reveals not only general abuses, but sex-specific horrors. So many farm animals used for the meat industry are female, and often repeatedly impregnated.  Sonia Faruqi in Project Animal Farm tells the story of her visit to a pig warehouse. One of the men who escorted her “crouched onto his knees behind a laboring sow and forced his arm into her womb–past his elbow. The sow, who’d appeared dead, jolted to life like a defibrillated patient. She jerked, twisted, screeched, struggling to escape Charlie’s arm, but unable to, for her crate trapped her firmly in place.” 

Why did he do this? Ostensibly, he was trying to speed up the birth, though he did this without results to every laboring sow in the room. It is not hard to see his attitude and action as on a continuum with the rape of a pregnant human.

Carol Adams writes in The Pornography of Meat, “For cows, sows, chickens, and female sheep, their reproductive and productive labor have merged. Their bodies must reproduce so that there will be ‘meat’ for humans, so that there will be eggs for humans. And so the ‘science’ of animal agriculture has gone precisely where dominance goes–manipulating sexuality.” 

Would you want to see a mammal or even a hen being artificially inseminated? If animals were just machines for our use, it just wouldn’t matter. Or if we had completely distanced ourselves due to a desire to eat cheap bacon, it would be no big deal. But many of us will cringe at the thought of such an obvious rape/forced pregnancy of a mammal.

Seeing Someone

That response we feel isn’t anthropomorphism. It’s emotional identification with another being, one forced to repeatedly reproduce for human convenience and pleasure. As Carol Adams writes, “It’s…seeing someone and not something.” 

This Earth Day, let’s take a moment to begin to see all animals as beings with feelings similar to our own, and not as things. From there, it becomes easier to think about the effects of our every-day actions on them.