“Your voice can change the world. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise” – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.

More and more people are realizing that the dairy industry is far from what we imagined growing up. Forget the wholesome image of green pastures and happy cows, dairy is a business so harmful for the animals and the planet that the full horror of it is hard to imagine.

There is something so profound in understanding that milk doesn’t come from cows but from mothers. For many, this simple reframing is heart-wrenching and shocking. Suddenly our cultural and habitual participation in eating and drinking dairy feels like a betrayal of the most sacred bond on earth: the bond between a mother and baby.

As the Canadian animal rights activist Danae Tonge once said to me in an interview:

“When my daughter was born, I knew that I had to start doing more fro animals as an activist. When I breastfed her, I was just thinking about the cows and how their babies are being taken away from them, without being able to bond. And how heartbreaking that is. I never really understood that bond until I had my daughter. It would haunt me, and I knew that I needed to do more.”

Mothers Against Dairy

The organization Mothers Against Dairy (MAD) was founded in 2016 by Ashley Capps, a writer, poet and animal advocate who now works at A Well Fed World. Ashley was inspired to found MAD after noticing that many mothers who go vegan do so after becoming mothers themselves, when they are in a position to more fully empathize with the violent and permanent separation of cows from their calves that is standard practice in the dairy industry.

Today, Mothers against Dairy is not only impacting mothers all over the world; the stories the organization brings to light resonate with everyone, because we can all emotionally connect with the mother-offspring bond in one way or another.

I had the pleasure and joy to meet with Ashley the other day for an interview. One powerful story that Ashley highlighted was told by Jessica Strathdee, a former dairy farmer in New Zealand, now a vegan activist and ambassador who transforms others by sharing her own experiences.

Below is an excerpt from her story; the entire narrative can be read at

https://freefromharm.org/animal-farmer-turned-vegan/jess-strathdee/

”In February 2013, my partner and I moved to live and work on a West Canterbury, New Zealand dairy farm with a 600 head herd. My partner was the second in command on the farm, and I was employed as a relief milker and calf-rearer while starting my studies with Massey University via correspondence. When I first started milking that year, it was getting to the last months of the season, before the cows were dried off for the winter. They didn’t have a great volume of milk at that time, and the milking would generally only take an easy 2.5 to 3 hours. I remember feeling a sense of pride, solidarity and sisterhood with the cows, honored that I was privileged to handle such a private area and process of their bodies. Except, of course, on dairy farms nothing about an animal’s body or reproductive process is respected as private or belonging to them.

Then calving started. I knew, logically, that cows need babies to produce milk, but I’d never really thought about the fact that those babies are almost immediately taken away from their mothers. On my first morning, I stood in the freezing pens with tiny babies who looked absolutely shattered; still wet with afterbirth, bloody umbilical cords dangling. Mothers who gave birth during snow or storms had their babies taken immediately and didn’t even get to clean them first.

The tiniest babies are tube fed, which involves a tube being shoved down their throats and into their tiny stomachs, and a liter of colostrum poured in. This is traumatizing to watch, and I can’t even imagine how it must feel. Their poor, tiny, soft mouths and throats that should just be suckling small amounts from their mothers while their systems are learning to work, must be so sore from the tubing.

It is not uncommon for day-old babies to have the tube incorrectly forced into their lungs and drown in colostrum within a minute or so, with colostrum pouring back out their noses. When this happens, there are many more fearful and crying babies lined up behind these, so the dead baby is thrown onto a pile of other dead ones as you don’t have time to do anything else but keep working on automatic pilot.

Oh God, what I numbed myself to.

That calving season, I worked every day for more than three months almost without a day off. All the other staff were just grinning and bearing it in order to get through their 16-18 hour days with only a half hour for breakfast and lunch breaks, because there is too much work to get through. This pace also contributed to the numbing effect, as did my need to believe I was a good person.

I cried every day, every single day, for two weeks while working in the freezing pens with these tiny cold crying babies who were often dying around me from disease and, I believe, heartbreak and shock.

Their confused and grieving mothers would walk past the pens from the milking shed back to their pasture, and stand at the fence and cry for their babies that they could see and hear but never touch.”

The Power of storytelling and the first International Calf and Cow Mother’s Day, 2026

I believe storytelling can change the world. Some people use poetry, like Ashley; others use film, music, writing or speaking. What stories about your journey into veganism would you like to bring to light? What have you personally witnessed that you’d like to share? Storytelling is an art we need now more than ever, an opportunity to share our grief, our joy, our longings and dreams. With stories we expand the circle of compassion by understanding more deeply how others feel. And every story can have a ripple effect, changing the dominant narrative far beyond our wildest imagining. We have more power than we think.

Mother’s Day began as a call to honor human mothers, but on May 9 and 10, International Calf and Cow Mother’s Day (ICCMD) will widen that circle of honor to include the sacred mother–baby bond across all species. This global movement rooted in storytelling, education and joyful plant-based celebration is being initiated by The Million Vegan Grandmothers, who invite you to attend their next online Convergence, from April 25–26. There, we will be continuing to plan and gather momentum for the inaugural event in May. To find out more, including how to host an event in your area, go to www.calfandcow.org.

The time is here for us to join in the call for justice and compassion. Together, through our stories, we can lend our voices to the voiceless. Together, we can change the world.

International Calf and Cow Mothers Day 2026

May 9–10

A global invitation to remember, to grieve, to tell the truth—and to take creative action to protect the mother-child bonds that make milk sacred.

Please join us at the upcoming Climate Healers Convergence on April 25-26 as we prepare for International Calf and Cow Mother’s Day 2026. Help us launch this inaugural event whose goal is widening the circle of compassion to include the mothers (and children) of all species.

With reverence and resolve,

Anne Casparsson,

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