[QUOTE=Nava]
You know, I don’t even know who signs them, but recently I noticed some posters I could see from the train. All I could see was the biggest lettering. The posters show pictures of cows and sheep and say something like “is this your milk?” and some druff about how drinking milk exploits animals.
I’ve never had kids nor breastfed, but judging by how badly my tits hurt at some times of the month and by what I’ve heard mothers say about “painful swelling”, my first reaction to those posters was “bet the idiot who wrote that has never breastfed. Probably a guy. Gee, wonder if we could get a nice milky cow and bring it to his house, see what she thinks about not getting milked, eh?” Morons.
[/QUOTE]
Sigh.
In a thread where you claim to be ridiculing the poor logic behind PETA’s arguments, you do yourself no favors by offering such a patently ridiculous argument.
You’re acting like the dairy farmer does the cow a favor by milking it, and that the only thing that protects lactating cows from discomfort is the kindly dairy farmer. It may surprise you to know this, but plenty of animals, cows included, are able to lactate without the assistance of a mechanical device.
What your argument completely elides, and what animal rights activists take issue with, is that, for the cows to produce milk in the first place, they have to be turned into little more than breeding machines. They are forced to pop out a new calf as soon as practicable after the last one, in order to keep up the milk supply. Then, instead of letting the calf drink the milk, they remove it from the mother as soon as possible and put her back on the milking machine.
I’m not saying that you are morally obligated to object to this procedure. And, as someone who drinks milk, and who has actually worked in a dairy before, i’m not in a position to be too critical of it myself.
But if you’re going to call the activists morons, you should at least make sure that your own arguments are based on an actual understanding of the issues, and can attain something better than “drooling idiot” status.