Something fishy about that statement.
Here’s the thing about cows, they cone in two sexes.
If you drink a lot of milk you’ve got to keep a lot of cows pregnant. You only need a few bulls that.
That means you got to do something with the male calves you don’t need for milk and don’t want to feed.
They don’t magically disappear. They either eat them as veal calves (minus the crate) or eat them as bullocks.
Either way, dairy cattle and draught cattle would get butchered and eaten at end of useful life, unless they died of disease. And there was also plenty of cattle raised for food in the areas that had the land for it.
Overall, ranching and dairy are almost always two different businesses with different factors.
Chicken and eggs are similar. Traditionally, young chicken was rare as the economics of a traditional farm were such that eating chickens were akin to killing the golden goose. Likewise, keeping beef cattle around consumes a lot of grass that could have made butter.
Another factor to consider that as the British took over, their inheritance laws took over, so farm plots would get divided over time. Large herds became increasingly difficult.
But, if they killed and eate 0.5 young males per cow per year, that would make the meat available once per year per cow. They could dry it or make sausage or whatever, but that does not make it a lot.
But really, at least based on what my grandmother said, meat was luxury item once a week thing. Cooked in away that uses it to the max. They were relatively well off small farm family, they were not poor. The traditional food I read about when I read about historical lifestyles was also largely non-meat. (Not to be confused with vegetarian, like bacon etc was part of it)
The eat meat everyday thing we have going on was not a thing in the past. It requires huge amount of animals being raised and killed, meat to be stored in freezers and so on.
Milking cows need to be having calves regularly so they keep producing milk.
Not owning a bull doesn’t make that problem go away.
It appears you may be right to some extent, but a bit of reading indicates dairy farmers to to have their cows birth a calf every one year to 400 days.
Older practices may vary, haven’t looked in to that.