The following is my response to an email thread about cow protection, or, more correctly, the lack thereof, in ISKCON, and the mentality that has led to that lack:

As a society, we have been using the rationale of yukta vairagya, the poor cow to be slaughtered will benefit from offering to Krishna her milk, as a crutch for too long. Srila Prabhupada gave us clear instructions that we were to set up farms. He allowed an exception for time and circumstance of using a thorn to remove a thorn, that drinking industrial milk was better than eating meat, and less cows are killed, but it was only meant as a stop gap measure, not to become entrenched as dogma.

Most vegans are situational vegans, they don’t drink milk because they look reality in the face and acknowledge the cruelty of current milk production. They look at ISKCON and see actions speaking louder than words, that although the books distributed are full of cow protection katha, it isn’t practiced.

Vegans as a class are probably the most realized and aware people on the planet now, and could be the base demographic of a resurgence of Krishna Consciousness in the West, but they are going to have to see ISKCON walk the talk if ISKCON wants to remain relevant as a vessel for expanding Krishna Consciousness in modern society.

Without cow protection in practice, it is like having a flat tire on a vehicle. It is okay to use the “donut” spare to get to a place the tire can be fixed, but if you continue to drive on it, it will destroy the differential and the car will become dysfunctional.

Yes, okay to use slaughtered cow milk as a field expedient measure, and use guru as a karma filter to make it offerable, but if complacency sets in for decades and no attempt to rectify the situation is made, we could expect things like gurus, overloaded with karma, falling, empty brahmacary ashrams, and preaching relegated to a rear guard action with mostly first generation Hindu immigrants as the main adherents.

Time to stop living in the past and start trying to apply Srila Prabhupada’s vision to the real world today.