It’s ironic that since a lot of US airlines - airlines everywhere, actually - treat you like cattle that they also might get a bit squeamish over the thought of a dairy. But last month a nursing mother was ejected from a plane about to take off in Vermont because she was trying to breastfeed her baby.
The extraordinary tale has sparked a discrimination complaint from the mother, Emily Gillette, and a huge embarrassment for the airline, Delta. The brouhaha here has also sparked a form of protest being dubbed "lactivism".
Over the past week there’s been rolling breastfeeding sit-ins where dozens of nursing mothers position themselves in front of the Delta airline counters in protest and, like maternal gunslingers, unleash their bosoms and latch on their babies.
Ms Gillette, her husband Brad, and their then 22-month-old daughter, River, were removed from an October flight from Burlington to New York after a flight attendant asked Ms Gillette to cover up while she was breastfeeding the girl.
Freedom Airlines was operating the flight on behalf of Delta Air Lines.
Ms Gillette, 27, filed a complaint against both airlines with the Vermont Human Rights Commission alleging that the airline violated a state law that allows women to breastfeed "in any place of public accommodation".
Ms Gillette told USA Today she took a window seat in the second-last row and her husband took the aisle. She began nursing River, using one hand to hold her shirt closed. She told the newspaper: "I was not exposed."
But the flight attendant approached, tried to hand her a blanket and asked her to cover herself, she recalls. "You’re offending me," Ms Gillette quotes the woman as saying.
"I’m not doing anything wrong and I will not cover up," Ms Gillette says she said in response.
Ms Gillette says the flight attendant walked away and a few minutes later, a ticket agent boarded and said the flight attendant had ordered them removed. The airline arranged for a hotel for the family for the night and a flight with a different airline the next morning.
"No woman should ever be ashamed of breastfeeding," Ms Gillette says. She wants "both airlines to create policies that protect a woman from being harassed for feeding her child on an airplane".
Freedom Airlines spokesman Paul Skellon says breastfeeding on a plane is OK if it’s done in a "discreet way".
Forty-three states in the US have instituted rights for women breastfeeding.
This reporter’s wife was told last year to cease breastfeeding in a public hall of a federal office, despite laws saying it is legal to do so. Congress passed a right to breastfeed in 1999, which governs all federal buildings and parks.