Posts Tagged ‘milk’

Kashmiris and Cows – 2019

Saturday, August 10th, 2024

Kashmiris and Cows: On Saturday 10th August 2019 I photographed three events, two of them by Kashmiris after the article of the Indian Constitution which guaranteed some autonomy for their state was revoked. Completely unrelated was a small protest by vegans against diary farming.


Kashmiris protest at India House and Trafalgar Square

Kashmiris and Cows

When the partition of India took place at independence from Britain in 1947, the state of Kashmir was an anomaly. Although this was a majority Muslim state it was not included in Pakistan as the then ruler decided it should become a part of India.

Kashmiris and Cows

Kashmir has three regions, Jammu and Kashmir the largest, became a part of India, the Northern areas are under Pakistani administration and a smaller region on the east is controlled by China. The whole area has been disputed by India, Pakistan and China since 1947.

Kashmiris and Cows

The special status of Jammu and Kashmir was recognised by Article 370 of the Indian constitution. This gave it “the power to have a separate constitution, a state flag, and autonomy of internal administration.

Kashmiris and Cows

Many Kashmiris objected to becoming a part of India and campaigned for independence with a brief rebellion leading to war between India and Pakistan in 1948-9. Various other conflicts came in later years and in 1989 an armed insurgency began, at first calling for independence but soon taken over by groups calling for merger with Pakistan.

The uprising has been suppressed over the years by a huge Indian military presence in Kashmir with an occupying force of around 800,000 military and paramilitary personnel and extreme levels of human rights abuses, including torture, deliberate blinding and killings.

In August 2019, under the government of India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Presidential Orders were made revoking Article 370, making Jammu and Kashmir a part of India on exactly the same basis as the rest of the country. They also split Jammu and Kashmir into two different areas, Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh. Like many, the Kashmiris say Modi is a Hindu fascist and his action has united the country against India.

A large and noisy protest took place on the pavement in front of the Indian High Commission, after which the protesters marched to continue their protest in Trafalgar Square.

More in My London Diary at Kashmiris protest at India House and Kashmiris protest in Trafalgar Square.


Vegans Protest Diary Farming – Trafalgar Square

Protesters stood in a small block wearing cow masks in Trafalgar Square calling for an end to diary farming which they claim is inherently cruel, with milk being stolen from cows and male calves being slaughtered soon after birth.

Vegan protesters call cows ‘mothers‘ and calves ‘babies‘, and they say that we ‘steal‘ the milk that the cows produce for their calves, failing to tell people that dairy cows have been bred to produce far more milk than their calves can consume, perhaps 7-10 times as much. And we only have cows in our fields because farmers breed them to produce milk for us to drink. We need to get away from emotional arguments and concentrate on the facts.

Traditional farming treated animals with care and respect – they were (and are) important assets. Some modern intensive practices are certainly cruel and should be condemned, both here and in other countries which mainly have even less strict animal welfare regulations. We could have a dairy industry which treated animals better and many of us would be prepared to pay more for the milk it produced.

There are good reasons to eat less meat and less diary products, but protests like this trivialise the issue. Good reasons why some people become vegans, but also good reasons why we should farm some animals to produce milk and meat. It would be a disaster for the environment if we all became vegan.

Vegans Protest Diary Farming


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Animal Rights & McStrike – 2017

Saturday, September 2nd, 2023

Animal Rights & McStrike: After photographing the start of the 2017 Official Animal Rights March on Saturday 2nd September 2017 I took the tube to East Finchley for a rally outside the UK Headquarters of McDonald’s.


Vegans call for Animal Rights – Hyde Park

Animal Rights & McStrike - 2017

Several thousand vegans met to march from Hyde Park through London demanding an end to all animal oppression in the 2017 Official Animal Rights March, supported by The Save Movement and HeartCure Collective.

Animal Rights & McStrike - 2017

Many carried posters or placards calling for an end to regarding animals as food or sources of wool and fur, and there were some dressed as animals.

Animal Rights & McStrike - 2017

In nature there are predators and prey and a complex interdependence between species. We are in some ways at the top of this pyramid in which some animals eat other animals as well as some eating plants, and our species has evolved as omnivores. We’ve developed some rather complex and industrial ways of doing this through agriculture and food processing, but essentially we are no different from lions eating goats though we have a rather greater choice of food. Are those lions being speciesist?

Animal Rights & McStrike - 2017

Unless we ate their meat, drank there milk, ate their eggs or fried their bacon, farm animals would not exist. There might I suppose be a few wild boars and deer roaming our countryside and certainly rather more rabbits but it would be a very different landscape and populated by very different animals to those that now adorn the vegan posters. Everyone going vegan would destroy all reason for their existence.

I’m certainly against cruel practices in farming and don’t condone the inhuman practices in some modern farming. I gladly pay the extra for eggs and meat that has been produced without cruelty, though it’s not always possible.

I can see no justification for fur farming, as there are good alternatives to the uses of fur and nobody needs a mink coat, and the trapping of animals for their skins seems barbaric. But while I’m against the use of animals for testing cosmetic products etc, I find it impossible to object to some use of animals in some medical research, though perhaps this could be ended as better methods are developed. There are strict rules governing it, though they could be tightened, but I wouldn’t be alive but for drugs whose development critically involved some use of animals.

For environmental reasons it is a good thing to eat less meat and I’m happy that many of us have reduced our reliance on meat and that some have decided to cut it out of their diets, and that others have gone further and vegans. Even more doing so would be a good thing, but everyone becoming vegan would be a disaster.

But meat is certainly not murder, though slaughter should certainly be as humane as possible – and it certainly isn’t always so. And milking cows certainly isn’t stealing their milk when they have been bred to produce many times the volume that their calves could possibly consume. Not milking them would certainly be cruelty.

Animals are not ‘Just Like Us’, though of course we have much in common. Animals interact in rather different ways to us (and to other animal species) it infantilises and confuses to refer to them in terms we use for our human relationships and culture. Human rights are different and more important than animal rights and I often found myself wishing that we could have as many people as active in protests over these as over animal rights.

More pictures at Vegans call for Animal Rights.


McStrike rally at McDonalds HQ – East Finchley

I left the animal rights marchers as they passed Green Park station and took the tube to East Finchley. The rally there was in support of McDonald’s workers who are holding the first UK strike against the company on Monday, US Labor Day, calling for an end to zero hours contracts, £10 an hour and union recognition.

McDonald’s workers complain about bad management and bullying at work and the strikers report threats and insults by managers. There was a table with chairs in front of the McDonald’s building calling for them to come and sit down and negotiate with the BFAWU, but McDonald’s refuse to have any dealings with trade unions

Ian Hodson and Joe Carolan from Unite New Zealand

Bakers, Food and Allied Workers Union (BFAWU) President Ian Hodson led the rally at which organisers from the New Zealand Unite union as well as strikers and other supporters spoke in solidarity. New Zealand Unite fought a successful campaign which ended all zero hours contracts and forced McDonald’s to recognise the union and pay higher wages and the BFAWU is determined to do the same.

More pictures at McStrike rally at McDonalds HQ.


Dairy Scary?

Sunday, November 10th, 2019

I don’t know how much of our milk and cheese actually comes from industrial dairy farms like that shown in the picture above.

According to the RSPCA only around 8% of UK milk comes from cows “housed all year round regardless of milk yield, time of calving and so on”. The RSPCA has a lengthy document for farmers setting the RSPCA Welfare Standards for Dairy Cattle, and a shorter and less technical  The welfare of dairy cows information sheet – February 2017 (PDF 654KB) which very much reflects their concern for animal welfare.

Of course these documents are only advisory and again I’m not sure what proportion of our milk and diary products come from farms which follow them, though I suspect it is fairly high. It is very much in farmer’s interests to look after thier animals, and those farmers that I have know personally are very much concerned and involved with them.

I’d like to see welfare standards such as this being legally enforced rather than simply advisory. But to label the whole dairy industry as ‘Scary Dairy’ seems to me misleading. Some of the claims that Viva! and other vegans make simply make no sense; no cow produces enough calves to need the 14,000 pints of milk the average dairy cow provides each year, and there are certainly no calves starving from lack of milk.

Of course farm animals are slaughtered at some point. It is the nature of the beast; farmers breed them only for economic reasons, not to gratify animal lovers (except for those very few kept as pets. They only exist because they produce food and other animal products that farmers can sell. Of course we should have strict laws that eliminate unnecessary suffering governing how animals are killed and ensure that they are enforced.

I remain irredeemably ‘speciesist’. We are in so many respects different from all other species although of course we have much in common, including a high proportion of our DNA, having evolved over thousands and millions of years from other species (which have also evolved, but differently.)

I did my best to photograph the Viva! protest and to caption the images that I filed to represent their views, reporting as objectively as I could. Mostly I chose to photograph things that I view positively, but while I support better animal welfare I think that the approach taken in this campaign is highly emotional and both dishonest and disingenuous.

  There are a few more pictures at Viva! protest Coca-Cola Dairy Farm.


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