One can have whey without the calf dying. I have personally seen whey produced without harming calves.
I also don't understand why some HNer's insist on downvoting simple questions. Trying to silence questioning is not healthy for society.
I also don't understand why some HNer's insist on downvoting simple questions. Trying to silence questioning is not healthy for society.
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.
If HN is about the struggle for truth I expect a certain amount of intellectual rigor in comments.
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.
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?
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).
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!