“Only mothers can think of the future because they give birth to it in their children” – Maxim Gorky.

Dearest friends and fellow guardians of the Biodiversity of Life,

We fervently believe that all babies—human and more-than-human—will one day be free to suckle at their mother’s breast.

The sacred bond between mother and infant has been honored by every culture across time. And yet we also know how brutally that bond has been broken—again and again—through colonial violence, forced separations, and crimes against humanity. We grieve the Indigenous children torn from their mothers’ arms and buried in unmarked graves. We hold the sorrow of histories that still ache in the body of the world.

While it may be harder today to commit such acts with impunity, our moral circle remains tragically narrow. Our reverence for motherhood still extends, for the most part, only to the human family.

And yet a cow and her calf know one another by sight, by sound, by heart.

The bond between mother and child transcends culture—it transcends species. Only our anthropocentric bias has allowed us to break that bond physically, repeatedly, and systematically, without a second thought.

Across land and sea, the children of many species are torn from their mothers. As Captain Paul Watson reminds us, whale hunts separate calves and cows of the ocean. Still, the cruelty at the heart of the dairy industry is among the most widespread—and the most normalized. That normalization makes it a powerful symbol of a violence that crosses species lines.

In the dairy industry, calves are routinely taken from their mothers within hours or days of birth so that their milk can be harvested and sold—often while the mother is still licking the placenta from her newborn. Globally, more than one million calves meet this fate every single day. The anguish of both cow and calf is well documented, and yet rarely spoken of.

This silence—this milky whitewashing—must end.

Milk is not a commodity. It is a mother’s first gift, precisely designed by each species for its own young. Somewhere along our cultural journey, we began drinking milk that was never meant for us, dressing the theft up as tradition and justified with false nutritional science.

Today, however, we have a chance to create a new tradition—or perhaps to expand an ancient one.

On Mother’s Day Weekend 2026, the Million Vegan Grandmothers will inaugurate the first-ever International Calf & Cow Mother’s Day—a global ritual of remembrance, education, creativity, and celebration that centers the sacred mother–child bonds across all species.

We are writing to ask for your help in launching this inaugural event.

First: Help Us Build Our Community Website

We invite individuals, schools, cultural groups, and communities to organize local art projects for International Calf & Cow Mother’s Day. Visual art, music, poetry, film, and storytelling will become part of a living online gallery of remembrance and compassion.

Selected works will also be printed on Mother’s Day cards, with proceeds supporting animal sanctuaries. Please contribute your art to grandmothers@climatehealers.org

Second: Contribute to Our Recipe Book

The Milk of Human Kindness: Recipes for Creamy, Plant-Based Comfort Food

We are collecting recipes that offer comfort not only to humans, but to all animals. Each recipe will be paired with family stories and optional how-to videos—bringing compassion into kitchens, clinics, and classrooms alike.

Proceeds from the downloadable PDF will support animal sanctuaries. Please email a PDF of your recipes to grandmothers@climatehealers.org

Third: Help Build Mother’s Day Events & Toolkits

We are creating toolkits for communities and schools who wish to host compassionate Mother’s Day picnics, art shows, storytelling circles, vigils, and sanctuary visits.

We are seeking:

• Musicians and filmmakers willing to donate or license short works
• Restaurants interested in offering plant-based Mother’s Day brunch menus
• Funders to support art exhibitions and sanctuary visits

Please contact me with your concrete offer at grandmothers@climatehealers.org

Finally, we invite everyone to join the Million Vegan Grandmothers and to sign our pledge—affirming our commitment to love and protect the children and grandchildren of all species, and Mother Earth herself.

We are not yet a million in our email list.

But we know millions of us are out there.

If you feel this call in your bones, please join us—and help us share it.

This Mother’s Day, let us fully honor the bond between mothers and babies by expanding motherhood beyond species lines. Let us transform a narrow, anthropocentric tradition into one rooted in compassion, creativity, and courageous action.

By raising awareness and channeling love into effective change, we can help end the dairy industry—and allow the milk of human kindness to flow in its place.

With reverence and resolve,

Tami Hay,

for the Million Vegan Grandmothers
Happy International Calf and Cow Mother’s Day
May this be the first of many!