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that eating animal flesh is a serious violation of ahimsa. Moreover, the failure of Jains to adopt veganism rather than vegetarianism as a baseline makes ahimsa appear to be arbitrary and this weakens the normative force of ahimsa as a foundational principle. The usual response at this point is to say that some treatment of animals used in the dairy, wool, and silk industries is terrible, these products can be produced without violence in “humane” ways. But this way of addressing the matter misses the point in two ways. First, the issue as far as Jainism is concerned is not how violent dairy products or wool are. The issue is whether they involve violence at all. If they do, then dairy and wool involve the intentional harming of mobile, five-sensed beings. And there can be no doubt that the most humanely produced dairy and wool involve harming and causing distress to animals and killing animals. That is, the dairy and wool industries necessarily involve the suffering and death of mobile, multisensed (and for the most part five-sensed) beings. Animals used in dairy production are kept alive longer than animals used for meat, treated as badly if not worse, and end up in the same slaughterhouses after which humans consume their bodies. Cows used for dairy are impregnated forcibly on a yearly basis and are manipulated with hormones to produce six to eight times as much milk as they would normally produce. They are killed after about five or six years although their natural lifespan is about twenty years. The male babies of dairy cows are sold into the veal industry and most of the females are used in the dairy industry. It is an endless cycle of exploitation, suffering, and death. There is an inextricable relationship between the meat industry and the dairy issue. You cannot have a dairy industry without a meat industry. It is no coincidence that India now is the largest producer of dairy products in the world at the same time that the Indian beef
2 “Dairy Industry in India: 2013-2019,” Research and Markets, available at
http://www.researchandmarkets.com/research/dklccg/dairy_industry_in.
An Ahimsa Crisis: You Decide
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