I'm aware of the is-ought problem with my statement, but my point is that that is the role calves play when we want cow dairy products. The problem with it as it exists today is the barbarous nature of factory farming.
Milk production is performed by making cows pregnant repeatedly (about once per year I think) throughout their lives and then killing most of their calves. Once the mother cow is worn out from all the births, they too are killed.
Milk cows are not generally used for meat. That is a different breed of cows. Milk cows almost never have male offspring - with AI we can control to ensure only female calf's are born (IIRC this is about 97% accurate so a few males are born). A few great milk producing mothers will be given sperm that is male only thus ensuring enough bulls to provide fathers and improving genetics for the next generations.
Back of the envelope math: cows live for about 20 years, but dairy cows are killed after about 4 years when their milk production slows. Assuming they are impregnated 4 times, that's (5 cows * 20 years per cow) / (4 years) = 25 times as costly. And this 25 times as costly milk has to compete with the 1 times as costly milk in a market that's already so competative that milk is sold below cost with government subsidies. It's impossible for practical purposes.
If you're comparing today's market, practices, and subsidies (which are all just measurements of the same signal) to a fictional world where we didn't want to kill any calfs, but using today's subsidies and prices, then I think that's not a fair comparison.
If god appeared and said that the Hindus were right all along and cows are sacred and milk is their gift to us - we'd do it just fine.
When I sit down and think about the amount of murder required to maintain any omnivorous or carnivorous creature, it's really a mindwarp. I (at least) have been quite separated from it my whole life, until I started hunting, really.
Wolves and large carnivores especially are just brutal. They will take your children down and eat them alive in front of you. Fair exchange we drive them off and kill you quickly, is at least one way of looking at it. But there's no "pleasant" way of looking at any of it.
What you have seen (whey without calves harm) is probably typical an old farming practice OR of some rural family production. That’s great for them and their cows, but have nothing to do with 99% of the milk consumed daily, even the best quality you can buy wherever else those farms are.
Do you think all dairy cows need calves to create milk? I don't care if someone disagrees with my posts I agree that they engage in conversation. Downvoting without explanation is my complaint. Finally the comment that whey production results in dead calves is pretty simplistic and not based on any analysis that I can discern.
If HN is about the struggle for truth I expect a certain amount of intellectual rigor in comments.
I meant "I agree with you about the downvote think".
I also read your explanation in sibling thread. IMHO you’re right about the calves not-killed if we only look for a specific time frame , but it can’t work on the long run. If you can please share some materials for us to learn more. Also, cows definitely needs a clave to start the milk production.
The mother very quickly starts producing more milk than the calf can drink. In the wild the milk production levels off to the level of the calf's intake (and then slowly rises to match their needs as they age and then tapers off as they age further).
In a small dairy situation the calves are kept off of the cows for either the morning or the evening milking and so the cows' milk production remains high the entire time. The calf weans, but from the cow's udder's perspective the calf is still suckling like mad and so the cow keeps producing milk. The calf grows up and is bred themselves, doubling the milk output over the course of two to three years.
Now this isn't sustainable in a paperclip-optimizer kind of way, so only the best milkers are kept and the ones that either have a hard time getting pregnant, or are ornery, or produce less milk, or get sick regularly wind up getting harvested for their meat. But there's no need to kill the calves (at the local dairy scale).
I still don’t understand how you keep the calves alive. Ok for one or two year but if you want to maintain a regular production over the years, at some point you’ll have a bunch of male cows (not sure the right English word for that) and a bunch of "bad milker cows". I mean I totally agree what you describe is possible and even the reality in a few ranch but it has nothing to do with what’s happening for the vast majority of cows.
Side note: on the other side of the calves killing scale, some farmers (in Swissland at least) started to kill male calves directly at birth because they found it more profitable at scale. Yummy Toblerone!
> Wait until it is done weaning to start using it's mother's milk.
Then what happens to the calf? They raise it to the end of it's natural lifespan as a pet? Are male and female calves treated differently?
> Most Dairy cows don't need to have a calf to produce milk.
I can't find anything to corroborate this. Every source I find on the topic says dairy cows produce milk for up to about one year after giving birth, then they need to be re-impregnated to begin producing milk again. Do you have a source for this claim?
I'd wager most people actually do inconveniently hold some vegan ethics, but there's a blind spot due to tradition, culture, and habit.
For example, most people have some sheepishly held position against factory farming despite partaking in it. And they think it's wrong to kick a dog and a pig and a cow. And watching a documentary like Dominion or Earthlings makes them feel horrible so they'd prefer not to watch it.
