On Monday night the BBC aired an episode of its investigative documentary show Panorama entitled ‘A Cow’s Life: The True Cost of Milk?’ The reaction from viewers has been huge and heartening, while that of the dairy industry has been furious but rather more predictable.

On Twitter, many people shared their thoughts after watching the program. 

“I’m not buying cow’s milk again,” tweeted one viewer.

“I’ve decided to go vegan,” said another.

“[D]isgusting treatment of animals will never drink milk again,” said another.

Documentaries revealing the abuse animals suffer on farms such as Earthlings and Dominion have been very impactful in turning people vegan and raising awareness around the cruelty involved in the meat, egg and dairy industries. But as the BBC appeals to a more general audience, and Panorama is a programme that covers a wide variety of topics, A Cow’s Life helped to bring the realities of dairy farming into focus for people who might otherwise have happily carried on not knowing.

The episode showed footage obtained by an Animal Equality undercover investigator who posed as a worker at Madox Farm, a large dairy farm in Wales where staff frequently kicked and hit cows with their fists and with shovels, as well as leaving a sick cow to suffer for at least 24 hours instead of paying for a vet to euthanise her immediately. But the programme didn’t try to suggest such abuse is widespread in the industry and was actually quite sympathetic to dairy farmers. This makes the reaction of viewers even more striking, as people seem to also be rejecting the industry based on a practice that is standard on almost every single dairy in the world: the separation of mother cows from their newborn calves.

A good indication that people were upset by finding out about cow-calf separation is how much traffic the so-called Ethical Dairy, which featured on the programme and keeps calves with their mothers for five months after birth, received after the episode aired. Leaving aside the question of how ethical it really can be while its male calves are still destined for slaughter, the Ethical Dairy by the admission of its owner David Finlay is an outlier in an industry that sees its farming methods as “toxic” and, importantly, doesn’t produce liquid milk but only artisan cheese and ice-cream. 

Meanwhile, a board member of the National Farmer’s Union (NFU) Wales, Abi Reader, explicitly acknowledged the inherent moral quandary of the dairy industry that is cow-calf separation. “This is the biggest issue that dairy farms globally are focusing on,” she said, of the fact that most dairies take calves away from their mothers in their first 24-48 hours of life. “As an industry, we recognise that this is something difficult for consumers to grapple with.”

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What the programme didn’t show was what happens before or after the separation, namely the impregnation of the cows through artificial insemination and the slaughter of male calves that are of no use in dairy production. Nor did it explain that these practices are also intrinsic to the economics of the dairy industry. If these activities are practically unavoidable for producing milk and other dairy products, then it’s more than fair to ask whether these products should be made at all.

Despite these and other omissions, the programme was a fair look at the way Britain’s dairy industry operates, featuring three other farms (including the Ethical Dairy) where farmers got to talk about how well they treat the animals. It also spent a lot of time on the financial difficulties faced by farmers and how the cheapness of milk can mean farms can’t invest in measures that would make the cows’ lives more comfortable. Indeed, the only solution Panorama explored for improving animal welfare on dairy farms was raising the price of milk. Not once did it mention alternatives such as plant milks - repurposing land to grow oats or installing vertical farming, for example - or advances made in cell-cultured milk. So although it used undercover footage from an animal justice charity, it otherwise avoided all discussion of non-human rights or veganism.

In the aftermath of the documentary, dairy farmers seem to have ignored almost all the aspects of the programme that actually paint their industry in a good light, instead focusing on the scenes showing explicit abuse on the farm in Wales, claiming that it was unbalanced and biased. This is very telling, given that these single-farm investigations are generally brushed off as ‘bad apples’.

The falsely perpetuated narrative that Madox Farm is one ‘bad apple’ (it’s not, and the BBC could have shown more examples if it had wanted to) and that the vast majority of dairy farmers love and care for their animals reveals how much the industry normalises certain kinds of animal suffering. Even if most dairy farmers aren’t kicking and punching their cows, they are forcing them into conditions that frequently cause lameness and mastitis. Industry vet Roger Blowey said, “It would be unusual to find a dairy herd without any lameness”, mainly because of the number of hours a day they are made to stand on concrete floors for milking. According to the Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board (AHDB), around a quarter of dairy cows suffer lameness, while mastitis, an infection that causes painful inflammation in udders, is a “significant factor in dairy cow welfare.”

Meanwhile, some forms of abuse shown on Madox Farm in A Cow’s Life actually are commonplace. When the presenter showed footage of a cow being lifted off her feet by a ‘hip hoist’ and dragged from one place to another, her face bumping along on a concrete floor, animal welfare expert Professor Andrew Knight said, “That’s very obviously abuse.” But Blowey described it as “common practice”. Blowey is the same vet who featured in the Hogwood documentary by Viva!, and responded to undercover footage of extremely stressed, ill, and neglected pigs, by saying, “To me, it’s a normal commercial farm. To me, no definitely not a vision of hell.”

The pushback against the BBC from dairy farmers - all of which has been predicted and clearly laid out in this Twitter thread by political economist and food systems expert Jan Dutkiewicz - reveals their panic at how negatively seeing the realities of the industry has impacted people’s perception of it. For some viewers, the shock and outrage will fade, but the significance of this moment is nonetheless one that animal advocates can build on. The public reaction to the programme shows that people do instinctively feel compassion for animals. One day that compassion might win out, and the dairy industry knows and fears it.

Claire Hamlett is a freelance journalist, writer and regular contributor at Surge. Based in Oxford, UK, Claire tells stories that challenge systemic exploitation of and disregard for animals and the environment and that point to a better way of doing things.

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