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Comment by pm90 | Hacker News Reader

The importance of Milk/Cows has been recognized in other cultures as well. My ancestors found cows to be so important that they deemed it sacred

Today, India is the largest producer of Milk in the world, and that goes a long way in providing nutrition to its masses.

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In India, Cow is more of divine than Bovine. As author rightly mentioned "Agriculture-plus-dairying became the backbone", in Indian civilization, it has been imbibed in culture that they both go hand in hand.Their interdependence is well known Cow eats Grass/waste crops, Cow dung/urine is used as manure for the crop and mosquito repellants etc. And outputs of both are enjoyed by the farmer - Crop and Milk products :)

Why not eat the bulls for meat as well?

Bulls make more cows?

You only need one to impregnate lots of cows.

I wonder what happens to the male offspring of Cows in India?

not if you want a reasonably distributed gene pool, diversity of genes is always a good idea

Well, yes. You don't want one bull to do 100% of cows, but one bull can easily do an entire herd, and using In Vitro methods the most valuable bulls fertilise thousands of cows.

Up until recently, most of Indian farming depended on (and still does to a good extent) on Bulls ploughing the fields for seeding. That and bullock carts as transport.

That answers my question then - they get castrated and used for transport.

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