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This has been bothering me for some time now. It is as the title says, why does our respect for life stop with vegetarianism? When I suggest Sikhs should consider becoming vegan, it is become of the horrendous atrocities that occur within the dairy industry. Cows are forcefully artificially inseminated so that they get pregnant and lactate (produce milk) Their calves are taken from them so they don't drink the profits and then slaughtered for veal. They spend their whole lives in chains and being abused. Becoming pregnant and producing milk so often that raw milk is full of blood, puss and infection. They are injected with hormones and bred so that their udders swell to unnatural sizes, causing them immense pain, just so they are able to produce more.. Is this right? Can Sikhi justify this? I've reached a point where I've started to laugh at Sikhs that claim to be righteous because they are vegetarian because to kill for meat is wrong, but don't want to hear about dairy abuse. Is torturing for milk acceptable? It would be more humane to just kill the animal and take its meat rather than let it live and make it suffer! Perhaps Guruji never condemned the use of milk because perhaps in their time it was different. Perhaps there was not this evil level of greed that exists today. People just took what they needed/could from their farm cows. But times have changed and the treatment of cows in dairy farms is absolutely barbaric. How can we as Sikhs allow this to happen? The truth about dairy is no secret. There are volumes of information available, just as there are about the truth of meat industries. Yet why have Sikhs not taken an official stand to no longer be part of this cruelty? How can we happily be just vegetarian when true respect and value for life comes from being vegan?

What do you know about how the milk we drink is produced? All I knew was that cows are milked by a machine and they clean it up making it bug free... I thought nothing more of it. Cows raised for the dairy industry are intensively confined, leaving them unable to fulfil their most basic desires, such as nursing their calves. They are treated like milk-producing machines and are genetically manipulated and pumped full of antibiotics and hormones that cause them to produce more milk. While cows suffer on factory farms, humans who drink their milk increase their chances of developing heart disease, diabetes, cancer, and many other ailments. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wZcUrWAK-8Q