Nearly half of India’s milk comes from an animal with no scripture behind her, no religious groups fighting for her life, and no law standing between her and the slaughterhouse.
Cows Wander the Indian Streets, Why Not Buffaloes?
While strolling the streets of parts of India, it is not uncommon to see cows roaming freely, and it is tempting to read that as a sign of protection, but nothing could be farther from the truth. Those cows are on the streets because dairy farms have abandoned them: once they stop producing milk, sending them to slaughter risks legal trouble in states where cow slaughter is banned, so they’re simply turned loose by dairy farmers instead. Since male calves cannot produce milk, they are not seen as worth keeping and are abandoned as babies. What always confused me growing up was a simpler question: where are the buffaloes? Why do you never see them wandering on the streets the way cows do?
Cows Are ‘Sacred.’ Why Aren’t Buffaloes?
The reverence for cows wasn’t always part of Hinduism, it was built over time. In the Vedic period, roughly 1500 to 500 BCE, cow slaughter and consumption was part of certain rituals, sacrifices, and hospitality customs. It was only as ideas of non-violence, ahimsa, took hold in the centuries that followed, shaped in part by Buddhist and Jain philosophy, that killing a cow became unthinkable to most Hindus. By the middle of the first millennium CE, the taboo was firmly in place, and it has held ever since.
Buffaloes were never written into that story. No scripture assigns her a comparable status. Her slaughter isn’t something that drives the same emotional reaction as that of cows. However, water buffaloes, just like cows, are sentient individuals capable of feeling pain, fear, joy and stress. As complex vertebrates, they possess conscious awareness, distinct individual personalities, and deep social bonds with their herds. That should be enough for people to see these animals as worthy of our respect and consideration. Unfortunately, the reality these animals endure is atrocious. Their bodies aren’t treated as their own.
Her Milk, Not Her Choice
Not many people are aware of this, but nearly half of all milk consumed across India comes from buffaloes. On India’s dairy farms, buffaloes are impregnated almost entirely through artificial insemination, a process that begins long before the buffalo herself is involved. Breeding bulls at semen stations are forced to mount a “teaser” buffalo so their semen can be collected, then frozen and shipped out to farms nationwide. There, a farmer or technician inserts an arm into the buffalo’s rectum to hold her cervix in place, while guiding a thin metal rod through her vagina with the other hand to deposit the semen into her uterus. This is done over and over again, cycle after cycle, for every pregnancy required to keep her producing milk, because like all mammals, a buffalo only produces milk after giving birth, and her body is kept in a near-constant cycle of impregnation, birth, and lactation to profit the industry.
A Bond Broken Before It Can Form
Buffaloes, just like humans, carry their babies for nine months and have strong maternal instincts. After giving birth, buffalo mothers and calves are meant to go through a critical bonding period in which olfactory, tactile, auditory, and visual cues are exchanged between mother and baby: sniffing, licking, grooming, and listening to the calf’s vocalizations. This bonding is tied to the calf standing early, finding the udder quickly, and getting colostrum, the first milk carrying passive immunity. On dairy farms, that window rarely gets the chance to open at all. Female calves are pulled from their mothers within hours of birth and are fed artificial milk replacements instead. In their first few days, some may be allowed to nurse briefly, once a day, before being dragged away again. These female calves are raised only to replace their mothers, who will eventually be slaughtered. They are impregnated prematurely, and the cycle of violence repeats with them.
Male calves, who will never produce milk and are “worthless” to the industry, are often taken away immediately and deprived of milk altogether. They are either starved to death or sent to a slaughterhouse to be killed for their flesh or skin.
In 2022, I visited buffalo dairy farms in Mumbai and saw exactly what that looks like. In the back alley of one farm, I found the bodies of several buffalo calves who were starved to death, partially eaten by scavengers, their bones already showing. On the same farm, I saw dozens of buffalo babies kept away from their mothers, some tethered to a pillar just a meter away. The mothers could see their child but could not get close to her or nourish her. It was heartbreaking, yet all too common.
Researchers have recorded the same thing I saw in Mumbai. In a 2025 study, buffalo mothers separated briefly from their newborn calves, close enough to see and hear them but not touch, vocalized in visible distress, their pitch rising and falling sharply as they called out.
As a form of resistance, mother buffaloes withhold their milk after their baby is separated since they only want to feed their babies. Dairy farmers, in response, stuff the body of a dead calf, who was starved to death, with straw or hay to create a makeshift replica known as a “khaal bachha,” literally “skin baby,” to trick her into believing her calf is still alive, and steal her milk. There is no gentler way to describe this: it is a crime against motherhood itself.
As if separating babies wasn’t traumatizing and painful enough, Animal Equality investigations in India have documented that dairy farmers also routinely and illegally inject cows and buffaloes with oxytocin. This hormone is used to force milk letdown after calves are separated from their mothers, causing the animals severe labour-like pain, damaging their reproductive health, and remains banned under Indian law.
If She’s Not Raised for Meat, Why Does She End Up as ‘Beef’?
India has no farms where cows and buffaloes are specifically raised for their meat. Every single cow or buffalo who ends up in the slaughterhouse came from a dairy farm, making dairy and beef two sides of the same coin. Many find it hard to comprehend: India, a nation renowned for honouring cows, is one of the largest exporters of beef in the world, but the reality is a bit more complex. Since cow slaughter is banned in the majority of states in India, most of that beef supplied is actually buffalo, not cow. The USDA’s own trade reports treat Indian beef exports and ‘carabeef,’ buffalo meat, as essentially one and the same, since almost no legal cow meat enters the supply to begin with. India is, in practice, the largest exporter of buffalo beef in the world. And it isn’t just leaving the country: domestic demand for carabeef is rising too, driven by a growing population and a growing middle class, and it remains the cheapest red meat in the Indian market, in some seasons even cheaper than chicken. Her body, once again, priced for someone else’s convenience.
Not Even Safe in a Fully Vegetarian City
You’d think that a place that banned meat entirely would spare her this. It didn’t.
In 2014, Palitana, a city in Gujarat, India, became the world’s first legally vegetarian city. The government banned animal slaughter and outlawed the sale and consumption of meat, fish, and eggs following a hunger strike by 200 Jain monks.
On his trip to India, vegan traveller Lucas Spiegel visited Palitana with high hopes of finding a utopia for all animals, free from suffering and violence. Unfortunately, the reality of the city was far from that, despite a ban on slaughterhouses and the sale of meat, fish and eggs.
He witnessed gentle buffaloes being subjected to a life tied on a small chain, their babies taken away from them and tied away so that the milk could be stolen to be sold to humans. This was not on a large-scale industrial farm, it was all on a small, local dairy farm that many Indians believe treat animals like “family members”. We would never do to our own mother or children what we do to these buffaloes. He spent most of his time with some buffaloes on a local dairy farm and said, “Water buffaloes are gentle, curious, affectionate, and forgiving.” Yet we disregard their lives, their right to be free, nourish their children, and not be exploited.
A vegetarian city would never be a utopia for animals, because the issue is not simply not eating animals. It is our mindset of seeing them as lesser beings and feeling entitled to exploit their bodies for their meat, eggs, milk, skin, fur, and the list goes on. The absence of slaughterhouses didn’t protect buffaloes in the world’s first vegetarian city, and it never will as long as these animals are viewed as a commodity to exploit and steal milk from.
The Price She Pays
The calf tethered a meter from her mother, close enough to see her, too far to reach her. The mother bellowing for a baby who will never come back. The dead baby in the back alley whose life was cut short before he could even take a sip from his mom. Her body kept in a cycle of forced impregnation, birth, and loss, over and over, for five to seven years, until she can no longer produce milk and is sent to slaughter. The price of milk, ghee, curd, butter, paneer and cream is not paid by humans, but these buffaloes, the most ignored victims of the Indian dairy industry, that we don’t even notice.
The best thing we can do is to give a thought to these hidden victims of our choices, ditch dairy products, and switch to the many plant-based alternatives that exist.
Please check out the following India-specific resources to help you transition to a dairy-free lifestyle:
