This reality isn't obvious from milk ads. I'll admit I only learned the above in the last few years because nobody talks about it and when you try people will instinctively defend these uncomfortable facts.
This reality isn't obvious from milk ads. I'll admit I only learned the above in the last few years because nobody talks about it and when you try people will instinctively defend these uncomfortable facts.
The reason I think it should be taught at school is first because it basic knowledge. Farms employ a significant portion of the population of most countries, and that's what puts food on the table and keeps you alive. That's pretty important.
Another reason is that school can teach that with a neutral point of view. Not like extremists who will describe any farm work involving animals as torture, and not like the interested food industry who wants you to forget that yes, animals are slaughtered to feed you.
Personally, as a meat eater, I think that realizing that an animal died for your food helps respecting it. By that I mean don't waste it, cook it properly, appreciate the taste, and of course, prefer respectful farming practices as much as you can.
Now that I have learned to understand the world with a more informed and nuanced perspective than the one my public education provided me with, I would certainly agree much more with the "extremists" you mention than any meat-eater justifications of how it "keeps you alive" or "respecting" the animals by eating them. And I say this as someone who still consumes meat and other animal products.
Could you explain what you mean without using the word "respect" so I can understand your definition of it?
I think you could certainly argue that. Beef cows are slaughtered at around 3 years and diary cows are slaughtered at around 5 years but after giving birth with their offspring taken away several times (both have about a 20 year life span).
Personally, I don't understand how vegetarians justify it as being much different in terms of animal cruelty. You're still paying into a system that's killing animals for your benefit.
I've been vegan for years and I wish people wouldn't take this position publicly.
I agree with you, but it's more effective to have lots of people consuming fewer animal products than a few people cutting out animal products "100%". (Of course it's never 100%, that'd be impossible unless you left society.)
Let's be optimistic about the amount of change that normal people can do instead of chastising allies for not doing enough.
US waste and exports make it hard to sanity check these numbers, but in 2018 there where 31.4 Million beef cows in US vs 9.4 milk cows adjusting for longer lifespan that’s possibly a 5.5:1 ratio.
For total milk production from Wikipedia “ The United States dairy herd produced 84.2 billion kilograms (185.7 billion pounds) of milk in 2007” https://www.statista.com/statistics/194302/number-of-beef-an.... Lists numbers of beef and dairy cows.
185.7 billion lb / 9.4 million cows = ~20,000 lb per year * ~5 year lifespan ~100k lb. https://albertamilk.com/ask-dairy-farmer/how-long-does-the-a... However, I am not sure it’s a clear comparison as this may be excluding calf’s from these counts. Which would drop lifetime production closer to 60,000lb and better line up with other sources.
https://extension.sdstate.edu/how-much-meat-can-you-expect-f... Suggest a typical cow at 490 lb of beef and this https://www.nationalchickencouncil.org/about-the-industry/st... gives annual beef consumption of 58.1 lb beef per person per year (2019).
PS: Of note dairy cows are also consumed for meat, though generally of lower quality. Which further muddles the issue suggesting that reducing milk consumption might simply increase the number of beef cattle ~1:1 to compensate.
Still a net improvement over buying milk and meat isn't it?
Also, people are vegetarian for all sorts of reasons. For some it's about eating meat, for some it's about animal cruelty, for some it's about environmental impact, and probably there's plenty of other reasons
Where does this end? Industrial farming kills insects. We obviously don't have the same amount of love for insects as we have for cows. But why should cows live and insects die?
This comes back to killing humans, one way or the other. How many insects are a foetus? Are poor people not allowed to have children so that insects can keep on living?
So for me, it ends at the meat and diary have a huge negative impact on the environment and I’ll do my best to reduce my share by avoiding meat and diary.
Instead of doing nothing because there aren't any perfect solutions, start by aiming to minimise harm when there's realistic options to do so? e.g. avoid cow milk in favour of oat or soy milk.
Dairy cows eat crops from industrial farming as well so if you're concerned about insects dying, less diary will likely help e.g. you could make milk directly from soy beans instead of feeding them to cows.
This a very weird claim. I know some fringe groups like ridiculing vegans, but I find it very hard to believe that a majority of people would have a negative view towards veganism.
I have first-hand knowledge of "the dairy industry". I don't see cruelty. Can you fill me on what's cruel about it?
I'd also like to add that most vegans are not magically averse to meat or dairy as a product: they are mostly concerned with the industrial complex of producing animal products. I think most vegans would have no, or at least a lot less, problems with dairy production if it happened in a way where cows were treated very well and did not suffer in any way from having their milk taken (which would make milk prohibitively expensive, I assume).
What are you going to do with the cows after 5 years into their 20 year life span when they stop producing as much milk? I can't see any way you're going to make people against animal slaughter happy with the only practical option.
Also, I'm not a vegan so I'm not going to debate you on this.
It's more of a spin from the phase "milk is for baby cows" though (not sure what the equivalent would be for cocaine). I used to roll my eyes at this as a naturalistic fallacy but point the being made here is:
1) cows do not give milk unless they've been pregnant
2) the newly born calves need to be separated from their mothers so there's more milk sell
There's no similar ethical difficult with oats.
Human ethics clearly shouldn't and aren't based on what other animals do to each other though.
> the fact is that cows at this point would stand almost no chance in nature since we have bred them to the point of cuddly teddy bears
You could justify anything with this argument: "doing X to Y is bad, but we've specifically bred Y to have X done to them such that Y can't survive in the wild anymore, therefore it's okay to do X".
Just stop breeding them. There's related species in the wild that will live on.
In ethical terms, most people simply do not feel that the suffering of animals is equal to that of humans. One may not agree with this, but it's why people eat meat in the first place, or accept animal testing for medicine. So, as long as "specism" is the reigning morality that people subscribe to, it's unlikely we'll see a vegan wave, unless perhaps there's a climate component driving it as well.
What I _do_ care about is how those animals are treated before they are killed. I am aware of the process for keeping dairy cows productive. I also am uncertain if the separation of calves and cows causes distress. I find it just as likely that assuming so is to anthropomorphize them. However, the reason I don't know the answer to that is because the treatment of farm animals in factory farms is far more concerning to me.
The biggest disconnect between vegans and non-vegans seems to be the assertion that animals can't be raised ethically for food. Instead of focusing on areas of commonality between each other, a distaste for the unnecessary suffering of animals, each party focuses on the disagreements and can't get anything done together.
Also, as an aside, the process you describe makes the cow's milk "made for humans" as much as anything is. Humans manipulate the cow's biology to produce milk for humans.
There's plenty of YouTube videos of how cows react to this. Most animals instinctively protect their offspring, and cows are social animals on top of this.
> The method works by staining sperm with a DNA-binding fluorescent dye. The bovine Y-chromosome-bearing sperm contain 3.8% less DNA than the X-chromosome-bearing sperm. Because of the dye, the male and female sperm can be electrically charged differently. This allows for their separation by a fluorescence-activated cell sorter (Seidel, 2007). The method is fairly accurate with ~90% of the sperm containing the desired sex (Garner and Seidel, 2003; DeJarnette et al., 2008). Sexed semen will contain a lower concentration of sperm per straw (approximately 2 million) than non-sexed semen (approximately 20 million) because the sorting process is relatively slow. Because of lower doses of sperm per straw, and possibly a negative effect of the sorting process, fertility of sexed sperm is typically lower compared with conventional sperm (Garner and Seidel, 2003; DeJarnette et al., 2008).[1]
1. https://dairy-cattle.extension.org/the-economics-of-sexed-se....
The biggest "industrial" dairy we visited had most of the cows under cover in large, open-sided sheds. The sheds were ventilated and the cows had fresh bedding regularly, and I'm confident this wasn't put on for us given we were a tiny camera crew. I expected it to be completely miserable but the areas the cows lay to ruminate was clean and they all looked very content. The cows in this operation were much, much cleaner than those at traditional, smaller dairies we visited (who got absolutely filthy with each other's waste, lying out in fields to ruminate). I imagine it's like being given food and allowed to sit on the couch watching TV all day, which is what half of us do already.
Not sure if they have a solution for the separation and permanent pregnancy issues.
The ads and PR about the various sugary cloudy white water drinks always de-empathize the sugar delivery, and the marketing always subtly supports the ignorant faux ethical arguments around dairy pushed with religious zeal by certain groups.
What faux ethical arguments are those? Oat milk is less resource intensive and reduces animal cruelty - those are compelling ethical arguments to me.