My Experiments with Life

Last week I came across an article on milk, called the milk letter , written by a doctor, Robert M. Kradjian. This well written article tries to claim why cow's milk is not at all necessary for humans, and also about the ill effects of consuming dairy milk. The article is long, but worth a read. Apart from the health reasons and justifications, I was more struck by the ethical part of it. A cow's milk is for its calf, as much a human mother's milk is for her baby. How about depriving a baby of his/her mother's milk and using that milk to feed kittens and puppies? Milk has been an important part of the diet all over the world for a long time. I heard some African tribes do not consume milk. In India, or rather in India-of-the-olden-days, cattle were treated as a part of the family. While bulls worked in the agricultural fields, cows gave milk, after the calves had their share. Cows were revered as "Gomatha" or the 'mother cow'. The idea was that, after ...