We Can Be Angels
Whilst for many the concept of an angel is a heavenly body, resplendent with wings and a long robe, there are earth angels too. People of exemplary conduct and virtue.
Few things in life encapsulate the image of pure innocence more than sweet doe-eyed baby calves. With four of these gentle beings in our barn right now, we can readily attest to this fact.
Named after the archangels, Gabriel, Raphael, Remiel and Jophiel, we find in their vulnerability our capacity to be their angels. Sheltering them from harm, and ensuring their warmth, safety and sustenance, reminds us that if ever an animal needed an angel to watch over them, it is surely they.
Their deep soulful eyes, with the accompanying pleading gaze that is desperate for the mummas they were forcefully separated from only hours after birth – the ones they will never see again – is something that haunts one forever.
It too is an image we wish we had known of long before our complicity in the harm done to baby calves such as they. But to the “credit” of the PR skills of the dairy industry, it is one that has long been hidden behind bucolic images of black and white mumma cows grazing grassy green fields.
How naive of our kind to never ask, “But where are the baby cows?”
Slamming their melancholy moos even further into our hearts is the fact that science informs that, in the ways that matter most, the babies of both our species and theirs are the same.
Like human babies, they cry for their mothers; like human babies, they are driven to drink their own mumma’s milk; like human babies, they yearn for their mother’s caress and loving touch; and, like us, they love and are loved by their mothers.
Being separated from their mothers shortly after birth is something that most of us could barely contemplate happening to a human baby.
Yet every year in Australia and beyond, countless baby calves are sent to slaughter within their first weeks of life, considered as wastage and a by-product of the dairy industry.
If you are moved by the plight of baby calves separated under duress from their distraught mothers shortly after birth, so the milk she intended for her baby can be forcibly taken for human use, please remember this: however much you love dairy products, that mumma cow loved her baby more.
Be their angel, and find your divine path.