Who would dare get between a mother and her baby? It’s a relationship so instinctually powerful, that if you asked them, many mothers would reply that they would die protecting their children. Grandmothers would too.
Even when we are not physically near our mothers, we feel a spiritual string connecting us from our solar plexus to Mom’s. It spools through time, distance, it remains when we simply grow up and even through death itself.
Animal mothers nurture and protect their babies, too. Wolves and elephants famously live in families. Cows, goats, sheep and nurse and attend to their young, baby ducks follow momma duck in the cutest display of big and little ever. When I think mother, I include all mother species.
In April 2012, I read about Beetlebung Farm of Chilmark, Mass in the Wall Street Journal, http://on.wsj.com/PqzbMX
Last summer, Beetlebung had a baby goat it wanted to get rid of, recalled Mr. Fischer: “We wanted its mother’s milk. So we had a goat roast.” That goat dinner happened with friends on a long, communal table…
The people at this chic farm-to-table venue didn’t consider sacred the farm goat’s mother and child relationship.
The baby was disposable. Yes they ate it, but that reflects a culture of human entitlement to do what we will with other species’ babies, it isn’t biologically necessary. Imagine if aliens came from outer space and decided human babies were tasty. We would not agree with their cultural choices. But could we stop them
or would we hope they would stop themselves?
In order for farms to make a commodity product like milk or cheese, the baby goat or the calf who would drink the mother’s milk, must be eliminated. That is a tough spiritual trade-off that humans make—taking another mother’s milk- in order to have cheese.
So in honor of the natural beauty of all of the earth’s mothers, especially mother cows who want their calves to grow up strong on their own
mothers milk and despair when their babies are sold as veal. And in honor of all the mother sheep who love their lambs and want them by
their side instead of being sent off alone to the slaughterhouse-Ecco Bella will make a contribution to An Animal Place animalplace.org/and
For the Animals Sanctuary www.fortheanimalssanctuary.org/.
Both organizations teach humans that animal mothers love their babies as much as humans do, and it is bad luck to interfere with that sacred relationship. May is for all mothers. Because without them, where would we be?
