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A new short film about how milk is farmed in India has gone viral.
The 27-minute film, which was posted on YouTube by the Satvic Movement earlier this month, gained more than 866,000 views in just the first three days. The documentary-style short follows Satvic Movement founders Subah and Harshvardhan Saraf as they film inside Indian dairy farms.
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At the start of the film, the Sarafs say that they discovered things on the farms that “completely shook” them. The couple briefly interviewed a worker at the first farm they visited, but the landowner phoned him and asked the filmmakers to leave.
After being turned away from several other farms, the couple entered one where the cows are chained or roped around three feet from the ground. They remain stuck there, indoors, for 24 hours a day, seven days a week. To compensate for this lack of movement, workers at the farm have to administer medicine to support digestion. The cows are also medicated for fevers, diarrhea, and lack of appetite.
‘They too are trapped in this system’
At one farm, the Sarafs witnessed a worker injecting cows with a banned chemical to encourage milk production. At another, they witnessed flooded cow pens.
They also saw cows in areas that are never mucked out, increasing the risk of painful and potentially deadly infections such as mastitis. According to one worker, his farm has so few calves because most are trampled or suffocated and do not survive.
The Sarafs noted that most of the workers they met while filming were “warm and genuine,” welcoming the couple and answering their questions.
“None of this is their fault; they too are trapped in this system,” said Harshvardhan. At the end of the film, he and Subah encourage viewers to “change this reality” by reducing demand for dairy products and adopting a plant-based diet.
Read more: More Than Half Of Brits Unaware Cows Must Be Impregnated To Produce Milk, Survey Finds
The Satvik Movement and health misinformation
The Satvik Movement, a self-proclaimed health education platform, is built around nutritious plant-based food, yoga, human relationships, and living in harmony with nature. They also promote lifestyle medicine as a way of treating common ailments. However, the movement has received a significant amount of pushback from the scientific and healthcare communities over some of its claims and advice.
In 2023, the Satvik Movement’s Instagram account posted a video encouraging people to “sungaze” as a way of curing shortsightedness. There is no medical evidence for this. In fact, the unproven practice is more likely to permanently damage your retinas than to reduce your reliance on spectacles.
The Satvik movement has also encouraged sunbathing – which is strongly discouraged by most health experts – and claimed in a video from 2019 that the sun doesn’t cause cancer, suncream does. There is no medical evidence for either of these claims, but there is substantial evidence that UV rays can and do cause cancer.
A report from earlier this year found that there is a group of 53 social media “super-spreaders” who share a significant amount of health misinformation online, exposing up to 24 million vulnerable users to their harmful advice. The report also found that 96 percent of health misinformation spreaders financially benefit from their actions.
Read more: Social Media ‘Super-Spreaders’ Of Health Misinformation Put Millions At Risk, Says Report
