This dairy lagoon wedding dress consists of revolving ideas around the restrictive, constraining lifestyles of female livestock and human women. 

Dairy cows are forcefully impregnated and artificially inseminated to produce milk year-round. Like human women and other mammals, the production of milk occurs with the hormone inflections of pregnancy so these cows are forced to produce an offspring for the sole purpose of producing milk for humans, without a drop of it going to their calf. An entirely new entity is brought into the world and is simply considered a byproduct due to human greed. If the newborn is male he is sent to be veal, a merciful end though cruel nonetheless. If the newborn is unlucky enough to be female, she will have the same fate as her mother, living in a small, dark enclosure till she is just old enough to conceive a calf of her own. She will spend her life being looked down upon as a burden and insulted against, as if her existence is not the fault of her captors, that is until she can be of “value” and give birth. 

Mother cows have been known to scream for their young, they attempt to break out of their pens, break down fences, and go to other extreme lengths in their desperation for reunification. The extreme distress these cows demonstrate often lead them to refuse water and food. They get sick, become malnourished, and are impregnated again within three or four months. The cycle continues, with each new baby taken away from his or her mother. She is given no rest.

A cow’s body, just like a human’s, determines how much milk to produce based on depletion. Since lactation is intended to nourish baby calves, the cow’s body will produce more milk if the reserves get depleted. Consequently, dairy cows produce considerably more milk thanks to industrial, mechanical milking that vacuums out all the milk the mother cow produces. There’s no need for dairy farmers to even use their hands to milk their cows. These devices, industrial breast pumps, suck the milk from the cows and store it in vats for processing. This process is relentless, the dairy cows’ udders get extremely irritated as these cows are met with only pain during their short time on Earth. Like human women, the breast tissue gets inflamed and irritated to the point of it developing into mastitis when nursing. Imagine the irritation that comes from the industrial seal that must form around the teats, leaving the sores and irritation to get infected – especially in dairy farming operations where workers don’t check their cattle for health and wellness. Due to this highly unnatural and constant increase of milk production, the heifers’ udders and teats become irritated. Eventually, the physical body of the cows begin to give out, unable to support themselves, they are no longer able to produce milk for the calves they never met. If they can’t produce, they have no purpose, leading to the merciful bludgeon of death and to be sold as “low-grade meat”. A single dairy cow is forced to produce nearly 2,000 pounds of milk in a year, not one drop to their child.

Some claim that because the dairy cows are not killed, dairy farming isn’t harmful. However, death is often kinder than man. These responses fail to consider the daily treatment and quality of life for these animals and their offspring. In a free space, cows are able to live upwards 20 years. In these chambers of cruelties, they are allowed to suffer for 3 years before their body is unable to go on. Then, when cows get sick or can no longer produce calves, they are often bludgeoned to death. The same fate awaits female calves who fail to “thrive” at conceiving life in such horrid conditions. No non-human animal can escape their fate of being cruelly killed in factory farming operations. They also fail to consider the environmental effects of these mass farming operations and the amount of resource loss that takes place due to these corporations. Milk and feces are left to rot the earth in man-made lagoons. These dairy lagoons are the lazy methods of disposal for such wealthy corporations as they will only affect the local populations of rural areas, used to hide the horrific realities of our modern agricultural system, nowhere near their beachfront properties.  

This disregard of natural order and to continuously force a female cow to carry out a pregnancy to full term with no consideration of the child-bearer mirrors the legislation bans on abortions that force individuals with uteruses to carry pregnancies to term despite their personal wishes for their body. These legislations disproportionately affect minority women in restrictive, trigger states, especially those who have less financial freedom to travel and receive proper medical treatment and care or those without understanding familial units to provide support and compassion during complicated times. These factors and more put these women in desperate situations that force them into drastic and harmful measures that could be avoided if women’s health was treated with earnest rather than being constantly brushed aside.

Hispanic women, women in general, are raised to find a partner and get married, then are immediately expected to have a child. Their personal lives, goals, or careers are not important matters when their culture demands them to be a caregiver, a mother, catering to their husband and child. She, unlike the father of the child, is expected to want to have a child, to want to stop her advancements in education or career to raise this child. This is something she wants, she is expected to want, she is forced to want. 

To be married with children in a Hispanic family unit is a similar life sentencing as the dairy cows. You live in your confined space, tend to the home, have children when your partner wants, care for your partner and children without a node of dissatisfaction. If a woman is unable to conceive a child or the gender of her partner/ family’s choosing, she is considered flawed and at times disposed of, divorced or cheated on. 

The heifer, still young, awaits her fate as she watches from her dark enclosure. She can hear the wedding bells just thinking about it.