Every glass of milk requires a pregnancy. Every pregnancy produces a calf. And in Belgium’s dairy industry, that calf is taken from its mother within hours of birth. That is the practice at the centre of “Not Your Milk,” a campaign from Belgian animal welfare organisation GAIA and agency Altmann+Partners that launched on May 29, 2026, and has since run on television, in cinemas, on digital platforms, and across social media.
What Most People Do Not Know
Dairy cows must be continuously pregnant to produce milk. The calves born from those pregnancies are, from the dairy industry’s operational standpoint, a byproduct rather than a product. In Belgium in 2025, 333,191 calves were raised and subsequently slaughtered as a direct consequence of this model. Approximately 12% of them die before reaching slaughter age, a mortality rate significantly higher than the average across farmed animals. Those that survive are slaughtered between six and eight months of age, despite a natural life expectancy of more than twenty years. Belgian legislation permits as little as 1.5 to 1.8 square metres per calf, which is insufficient space for the animals to express even basic natural behaviours.
GAIA’s investigation, conducted across multiple dairy farms and calf-fattening units in Belgium in November 2023, produced footage documenting the isolation and conditions these animals experience. That investigation is the evidential foundation on which the film was built.
The Film: Number 3347
Rather than building a documentary around that footage, Altmann+Partners chose a different approach. The three-minute film, titled “Number 3347,” follows a cow on an epic and dreamlike journey in search of her calf. The narrative is cinematic rather than factual, built to produce emotional recognition rather than political argument. The cow is given a number, not a name, in a deliberate reference to the industrial logic that reduced her to a tag.
To direct it, Altmann+Partners enlisted Sebastian Strasser, a commercial director with over 250 international awards, including 20 Cannes Lions. Strasser mobilised VFX and SFX specialists to build the film’s visual scale. The score was composed by Peter Hayo, built around the original piece “Try” by Keaton Henson and Daniel Herskedal, a piece whose tone of persistent searching and unresolved longing anchors the film’s emotional register throughout.
Creative direction came from Altmann+Partners CEO Olivier Altmann, with copywriting and art direction by Thierry Lebec and Bénédicte Potel. The film was produced by Henry and Lipstick.
The Strategic Choice
The decision not to lead with shocking documentary footage is itself a creative argument. Animal welfare campaigns have historically relied on confrontation: graphic imagery, statistics presented as accusation, footage designed to produce guilt. The audience for that approach is already engaged. The “Not Your Milk” film is built for the audience that is not yet engaged, the one that reaches for a glass of milk without a single thought about what preceded it.
An epic visual narrative following a mother through a dreamlike landscape towards a calf she will not reach is harder to scroll past, share, or dismiss than a factual document. It invites the viewer to experience an emotion, then asks them to connect it to a practice they participate in daily without awareness. The facts arrive after the feeling, which is the correct sequencing for an audience that has not yet decided to care.
The Demands
GAIA is using the campaign as the public-facing element of a formal policy push. The organisation is calling for improved calf-rearing conditions, a ban on early separation and isolation practices, and stricter regulation of animal transport. The campaign platform at notyourmilk.be extends the film into a resource for both consumer behaviour change and legislative advocacy.
The title is the campaign’s sharpest line. “Not Your Milk” does not address the dairy industry. It addresses the consumer, specifically the assumption that the milk on the shelf belongs to the person who purchases it, rather than to the calf it was produced for.
Campaign Name: Not Your Milk
Agency Name: Altmann+Partners / Production: Henry / Lipstick / Director: Sebastian Strasser Brand Name: GAIA (Global Action in the Interest of Animals)
Location: Belgium (TV, cinema, digital, social media)
