Animals are divided into classes. No, not like the classes that you take at school, like math or reading: This means different categories! The five main classes, or categories, of animals are:

You drank your mom’s milk when you were a baby, are warm-blooded, and have hair, so that makes YOU a mammal!

Who is giraffe’s milk for?

Who is deer’s milk for?

Who is lion’s milk for?

Who is human’s milk for?

Who is cow’s milk for?

You might notice a pattern here. A mother’s milk is for her babies. As baby mammals grow, they no longer need their mother’s milk and the mother stops producing it. So why do humans drink cow’s milk? Not only is it weird that we drink cow’s milk, it’s unnecessary with all the yummy (and nutritious!) vegan products on the market today.

Of course, drinking cow’s milk isn’t just weird—it’s also cruel. In the dairy industry, cows are forced to have babies over and over again so that they’ll keep producing as much milk as possible. The calves are taken away from their mommies shortly after birth, sometimes only MINUTES after being born.

If the calves are female, they’ll endure the same fate as their mothers: to be used by the dairy industry to make milk. When they become too old or sick to produce as much milk as they used to, they’ll be sent to a slaughterhouse to be killed for meat. If the calves are male, they’ll be put in a veal crate, a small enclosure that keeps calves from being able to move around enough to build any muscle, so their flesh will stay pale. Calves raised for veal are killed when they’re only 12 to 23 weeks old.

The momma cow’s milk that’s supposed to be for her babies is sold for humans to drink. But we don’t need cow’s milk. We need human milk from our own mothers, and we don’t even need our mom’s milk once we aren’t babies anymore.

There’s a common misconception that “cows have to be milked” or that “cows just always produce milk.” But cows in the dairy industry are essentially turned into milk-making machines. They wouldn’t “need” to be milked if they weren’t constantly forced to have a calf who was then taken away from them.

There’s a delicious vegan option to replace every dairy “product”! If you like milk, you can enjoy almond, soy, coconut, cashew, hemp, oat, rice, or hazelnut milk. Many companies make vegan cheese, and vegan dairy products are not only healthier but also don’t cause animal suffering!