Animals & Animal Rights

I have recently decided to give up dairy for health and animal welfare reasons. I cannot find any reference to dairy in Daniel’s books.

I recently read an opinion that the drinking of cows milk is little more than a cultural tradition. I was wondering when people in human history started consuming dairy products and their reasons for doing so.

I found an article from July 21, 2002 in The Sunday Times Magazine, UK “Cover feature: Is there a time bomb in your diet? Exploding the myths about milk.”

It included the paragraph: “Just 7,000 years ago, the first settled communities, with their new-found genius for growing crops and domesticating animals, were able to create a relative heaven on Earth, verily a ‘land of milk and honey’.” This phrasing reminded me of something familiar and wondered how it fitted in with “the great forgetting.”

I also gathered from this article that 7/10 people worldwide are lactose intolerant because dairy culture was largely confined to the Caucasian minority, and today most of humanity still thinks it a very peculiar practice to consume milk beyond the end of weaning, and even more peculiar to drink the milk of another species.

So is cow milk drinking a product of taker culture? Or am I rejecting a part of my Leaver culture ancestry by giving up all dairy milk.

I suppose what I am really asking about is whether it is true to say that people only started to drink dairy with the development or invention of the kind of agriculture that made people Takers or was animal milk part of human life before then.

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There has been much talk lately where I live (the Seattle area) of the Makah Indian tribe, who have recently renewed the practice of whaling. Having just had my eyes opened by your books, I said “this is wonderful. They are returning to something that worked for them for a long time.” No-one else sees it that way however. Everyone here was angry, daring to lecture the Makah people about the “sanctity of life,” but I knew it was just because these supposed environmentalists had been conditioned to think that their way was the one right way to live. I was so excited to see a principle from your works in action, but became extremely disappointed when no-one gave what I had to say much thought. How do I find a positive in this situation, when few see it as such, and the rest won’t listen?

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Yes, but how are the strategies proposed in Beyond Civilization supposed to eliminate pollution, overpopulation, crime, teenage pregnancy, substance abuse, poverty, police brutality, political corruption, racism, child abuse, violence against women, homophobia, pornography, violence in film and music, exploitation of the elderly, date rape, judicial malfeasance, insider trading, road rage, and media bias?

Categories: I Have a Bone to Pick with You!, I Have a Question About the Books/the Characters, I Have a Question On a Specific Subject|Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , |
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