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Comment by jamil7 | Hacker News Reader

Sorry but there is no such thing as ethical consumption of cow milk.

How? My aunt has a cow(a single one) that lives next to her house, has access to a pasture nearby, and by literally any definition you could pick it lives as happy life as a cow can do(unless you subscribe to the idea that no animals should be ever kept by humans, but I am not convinced that would lead to a measurably better life for the cow). It produces a lot of milk that my aunt uses for herself and her neighbours take some of it as well. How is that not "ethical consumption of cow milk"?

I'm definitely not a farmer, but it is my understanding that for a cow to keep giving milk, it needs to give birth once a year. You cannot keep all those calves around, so they go to the slaughterhouse. That means that in an indirect way, the production of cow milk forces calves to be slaughtered.

It depends on where you place things on the moral scale.

For example for the cow to lactate, it needs to be inseminated. Every 4 years I think. When the calf is born it's taken away from the mother. Does a cow mother suffer emotionally from having their baby taken away?

Cows are sociable animals so a single cow would probably feel lonely?

I don't have the answers. It seems like research uncovers more and more human-like emotions associated to animals so it doesn't seem completely out of question. Humans also have a tendency to objectify things so they can shut off empathy.

There is a rare practice where you (for example) separate them just for the night and milk the cow in the morning. During the day, the calf will take the milk. Yes, you lose a lot of the milk that way, but apparently your vet bill also goes down because the calf will be healthier.

Another option is to pool several calves to one cow and foster them for more natural suckling behaviour. This is a bit more common.

Interestingly, apparently cows can choose to either give the milk or not which makes the logistics more complicated.

I can currently only find sources in German for this though ('muttergebundene Kälberaufzucht' / 'ammengebundene Kälberaufzucht').

It depends on your moral values which can be different.

If you skip the simplification vegans are using to justify eating plants (they don't scream and run away when we're trying to eat them) you hardly can eat anything ethically.

Plants lack nerves or a central nervous system or the ability to directly react to their circumstances, at somepoint you have to draw a line somewhere and most draw the line there. Regardless, if you really believe that plants feel pain, you're killing a lot more of them by raising animals for dairy and meat.

Apologies for giving both your posts the snip, but:

>> Plants lack nerves or a central nervous system or the ability to directly react to their circumstances

Is the same as:

>> they don't scream and run away when we're trying to eat them

Industrial plant agriculture kills and displaces untold numbers of small ground mammals. Thus the urban vegan doesn't get to pretend they have clean hands.

A pasture-fed cow kills approximately zero of the same.

Assuming your ethics give equal treatment to all mammals, the rural hobby farmer comes out far, far ahead of the urban vegan.

Cite your sources. This is a statement made by many without evidence.

Sure, if we all had a cow and two acres and lived in a temperature environment where the animals could graze all year, we could have milk after the cow has had a calf. But who impregnated her? And what are you doing with the calf because it needs two acres of grazing pasture too. And then who impregnates her next year and what do you do with that calf? Another two acres? What about the harsh winter or summer? You're going to need to supplement with extra hay. Off to the agricultural supply who... ah crap, they farm. Farming kills fuzzy animals! Now we're terrible again!

Cows, like all mammals, aren't unending milk supply systems. They dry up because they lactate for a reason. Your imaginary hobby farm is an unsustainable system.

Source: I have a grazing pasture and grazing animals.

Is rural hobby farming a massively scalable lifestyle? Would it still be less detrimental to the environment if everyone was doing it? I can’t imagine how much land, forests, wild animals that would displace.

Most draw the line somewhere around dogs

If we were to raise genetically modified cows that do not feel pain, would it be ok to eat them?

That's a great point! The pain rule seems a little arbitrary to me. Pain evolved only in some life forms for which it was beneficiary. It doesn't seem to make killing them more problematic than life forms which can't feel pain. It's only our emotions which react to pain and thus it seems worse.

There's also no such thing as an ethical person. Somewhere on the economic scale, in any country, a person's happiness is derived from another's suffering. Africa's cocoa farming. Sugar cane farming and production. Foxconn treatment of workers on cellphones and other goods. Clothing and shoe worker treatment in China and Vietnam. Slave labor use in cobalt mining.

But yea. I mean, let's gang up on cow farmers instead.

What? The dairy farm that is near me allows you to go and actually pet the cows. They're treated as ethically as a pet.

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