Ahimsa

Dairy that does no harm.*

The no kill dairy. and beyond.

Questions

  1. Could a cow, by choice, have a job?
  2. What are fair wages for cows? For chickens?
  3. How do you pay a non-human animal?
  4. When do livestock stop being slaves? Where's that line?
  5. and what would an experiment that tested this look like? and an experiment that explored fair wages?
  6. Does a being need to have a certain level of intelligence to make this choice? What animals are intelligent enough to choose?
  7. Is it ethical for an animal to “choose” to be milked? ridden? killed?
  8. Universal basic income for cows?
  9. What does a mutually beneficial relationship look like between humans and animals? What is the range of that?
  10. What does "cow retirement" look like?
  11. Is there a limit on what we can charge for ice cream? Most expensive pint? $20? $35? $50? Milk?
  12. Maybe I should have started with this: Is it possible for even one drop of cow’s milk to be consumed by a human and for that to be GOOD? Two drops? 100 drops? What does that look like?

Ahimsa Dairies

  1. https://www.ahimsamilk.org/ahimsa-milk/

    2. "Milk and other Ahimsa products, such as cheese, yoghurt, ghee etc. are often available only in limited supply. At present we have a long waiting list and are not able to accept new customers."

  2. Gita Nagari Farm - https://gnecofarm.org/

    3. "Gita Nagari was founded on the ancient principle of ahimsa (nonviolence). As such, we opened the first and only certified slaughter-free dairy farm in North America. In everything we do we strive to maintain the highest standards in animal welfare, environmental justice, and personal integrity. Motivated by the need for change in this world, rather than simply being driven for profit, the products offered by our farm are not just commodity purchases but are investments in the transformation of our collective future."

    Product Availability: Every dairy product (cheese) is sold out. Cost: $20 per lb (cheese)

  3. Kind Milk - http://www.kindmilk.org/

    4. $22 per gallon of milk. You could definitely get away with this (and more) at Erewhon.

    *”do no harm” reminds me of Google’s early motto: “Don’t be evil” At the moment they released that, it felt revolutionary. I personally felt passionate about it, a corporation was taking a strong ethical stance! And Google was doing this in direct counterpoint to Microsoft - the monopolistic tech-behemoth that dominated the early internet era. And Microsoft felt evil, at least to me at the time. A profit-driven monstrosity.

    And Google, with it’s ‘Don’t be evil’ motto, felt like the anti-dote

    But it only took about 10 years for that motto to feel outrageously inadequate.

    Don’t be evil?

    I mean, that’s a pretty low bar isn’t it???

    Hitler was evil.

    Stalin

    Vlad the Impaler

    Pol Pot

    Ivan the Terrible

    It’s should be super easy not to be like those guys.

    (and I don’t mean to assign all of the wrong-doing to a single soul. It takes a community of people - millions - to do as much wrong as some have done. And I recognize that almost all of us are implicated in the wrong-doings that are embedded in the wrongness of our time. The early abolitionists were truly exceptional - true ethical waypoints - a very rare thing!)

    Anyway, as an ethical goal, ‘don’t be evil’ feels like a failure at the very start.

    Let’s aim for being GOOD. For doing good.

    And in this context, I would pose this question: Is it possible for even one drop of cow’s milk to be consumed by a human and for that to be GOOD?

    A semi-related project: Ethography. An attempt to map ethical spaces:

Copy of Ethography