This excuse is actually almost dear to me, as it was the very last excuse I used before finally going vegan.   My addiction to dairy (primarily the casein in cheese) was so strong that I actually convinced myself for a few weeks that dairy goats were treated humanely; that dairy goats were not forcibly impregnated like their bovine cousins — that they didn’t have their kids stolen from them after birth, that they weren’t over-milked, and that they weren’t slaughtered after only a few years of abuse when they no longer remained profitable.

Of course, after only a few short weeks steeped in this delusion, I knew that something was amiss; I knew that – just like their cow-centric cousins — there is no way for goat farms to avoid bankruptcy (let alone remain profitable) if they treat their older, non-milk producing goats with kindness and respect.   I intuitively knew that male kids on all of these farms were slaughtered shortly after birth and that “used up” adolescent female goats met a similarly brutal end.

And it was at that moment that I finally accepted the fact that there is no way to humanely treat another sentient being as either a slave or as a commodity; I knew that there is no way to force another conscious being into service that involved immense suffering, and I knew that there is no way to caringly terminate another being’s life merely because he or she no longer satisfies my own wants or desires.

So after researching the goat dairy industry and finding that my hunches were glaringly accurate … I went vegan the very next day.

 

Current status of this Myth: Rebutted
Justification it provides for eating animals: NONE

Filed under: Minimizing the Myths of Meat by Scaughdt