One of the most bizarre things I’ve seen animal rights activists throw fits about are dairy cattle.
Now, one can make the case that dairy cattle are meant to be on pastures, and maybe they shouldn’t have docked tails. And maybe the nutritional value of dairy is something we ought to question.
However, one thing that the animal rights people worry about is that dairy cattle never get to mother their own calves.
This is supposedly the absolute worst thing that can happen.
It is a major feature of this piece by a vegan activist writing on a “farm sanctuary” ( read: food hoaders’) tumblr. The piece is an ode to a dairy cow that has recently, which in my part of the world would not be something that anyone would read or write without bursting out in riotous laughter.
Anyway, here goes:
I hope you will honor Sadie’s memory. She is a former dairy cow. She never nursed her own calves. Her only value? Her milk, meant for her growing calf.
Animal Place gave her an amazing seven years of life. She lived it with dignity. I am beyond honored to have been included in her circle.
She never deserved the hand dealt her.
You can help. Drink almond milk. Try coconut ice cream. Slap some soy cheese on your sandwich. Transition to a vegan diet and embrace compassion and kindness.
Never mind that monocultures of soy have a disastrous ecological effects and can destroy small farmers in the developing world.
And never mind that intelligent cattle rearing could be a solution to soil conservation and to climate change crises.
The real issue is that dairy cattle have been selected to be terrible mothers.
If you know anyone who has raised any kind of beef cattle, the cows are super protective of their calves.
When they are first born, it can be dangerous to approach a mother cow and her calf. It’s almost always dangerous for even familiar dogs to approach the pair.
That’s because she has very good mothering instincts, and there have been no selection pressures to produce cattle with weaker mothering instincts.
They are still very much like their wild aurochs ancestors.
Dairy cattle are quite the opposite.
When normal cattle are separated from their calves, they get quite stressed and start bawling for hours and hours.
This always happens when beef cattle are weaned. The mother cows don’t like to be away from their babies, so they try to call them back.
However, if a dairy cow got that upset and stressed when she became separated from her calf, she would be a terrible milk producer.
And because dairy cattle almost always have their calves taken from them, there has been an inadvertent selection pressure for a cow that has terrible mother instincts. If she doesn’t have a strong instinct to bond with her calves, she’s not going to be stressed when she’s producing milk.
Temple Grandin, a livestock expert, writes that a lot of this selection may have come from the desire to produce the most calm dairy cattle possible:
There is a need to select cattle and other animals to have a calm temperament. However over selection for any single physical or behavioral trait can cause problems (Grandin, 1998). It is probably a bad idea to select for the absolute most calm animals. Doing this might cause problems. For example, the Holstein dairy cow is very calm but she is a poor mother. Over selection for the calmest might cause a loss of other beneficial traits such as mothering ability or motivation to forage long distances on a pasture.
Now, I don’t think dairy is necessarily best use of cattle. I don’t consume much dairy in my diet. I get most of my calcium from almonds and broccoli.
I generally avoid milk because it’s too high in carbs. And regular carb consumption makes my ass jiggle. It also takes away all my energy. I don’t think as clearly. I’m also much more prone to moodiness when I’m eating lots of starchy foods.
But I do eat a lot of beef, and if we’re smart about our cattle rearing, we can actually mitigate so many ecological problems.
This is yet another example of where the animal rights movement is in conflict with possible solutions to real ecological issues, and the way that the animal rights fanatics frame it, ecology always loses when it comes up to emotionalist appeals about the “sanctity” of an individual animal’s life.
Holstein, Holstein-Frisian, and British Frisian cattle are truly specialized animals.
They would not exist without human intervention.
If they were left to be wild, they would hardly ever raise calves to maturity, especially if predators are around. My guess is these cattle would regularly tear their pendulous, over-sized udders and teats if left in a more natural situation. They are certainly more prone edemas of the udder.
In breeding super milk producing cattle, we have produced something like a bovine equivalent of a bulldog.
Like the bulldog, these animals would be next to impossible to produce without lots of human intervention.
I use very little dairy in my diet for my own health reasons.
Humans have only recently evolved the ability to digest lactose. Lactose tolerance in Europeans is at its highest in the region of Europe that was home to the Funnel Beaker region, which is about where my ancestors came from. The Funnel Beaker culture of north-central Europe was the first area where dairying became established in Europe nearly 6,000 years ago.
We’ve done pretty well without consuming dairy, even if a lot people can now digest lactose as adults.
So yes, there are problems with dairy cattle.
But one of them isn’t that the cows go into hysterical fits when their calves are removed from them.
And I am entirely fine with the problem of dairy being solved through consumer choice.
If you find that you can do well without dairy in your diet, there is no need to buy it.
I am not in all in favor shutting down dairies. The cows are generally well-treated and not stressed. If they were truly stressed through general operations, they wouldn’t produce milk. And yes, there are bad actors out there, just as there are in any industry.
But excessive moralizing about how much dairy cattle mothers suffer when their calves are removed isn’t at all helpful.
It makes someone look silly.
It certainly doesn’t make a person look like someone we should take seriously about issues relating to the environment and animal welfare.
Not to mention the fact that dairy cows produce several times as much milk as a calf could consume.
That too :)
If I recall correctly, there is a critical period where the offspring bonds with its mother. If this critical period is not fulfilled, then the offspring would grow up to be terrible mothers. The effects have been studied in many organisms and among orphans found in China and Russia, if I remember it right.
But it is not like terrible mothers would miss their offspring anyway if they develop asocial tendencies.
It’s typical that ARs humanize animals to a Disney-level and attribute far higher cognitive ability to them than is real. Overall, being ignorant about nature and biology is kind of a requirement in order to believe half the stuff they do.
Yep. One trip to a dairy farm is all it takes to convince one that cows are too dumb to miss their offspring for any length of time. Cows – they eat, they poop, they show up for milking twice a day. For excitement they break down a fence once in a while. They are nice animals, but they are just dumb animals, for sure.
This is a post I can really get on board with on a number of levels.
I was a lacto-ovo veg for years. I just stopped recently. I never had the discipline to be a vegan, but I did always look at those farm sanctuary sites. I cheered when the odd escaped calf running through the streets of Astoria would be spared and sent to one of those places. Nothing wrong with that. But I drew the line at shoving the agenda down people’s throats, joining parades and chanting to “Let my poultry go!”, and yes, the heavy anthropomorphizing of animals who only know where they are, and what they are doing at the moment.
“mmmmm. Grass good!”
Something doesn’t need to have a certain intelligence level to gain my compassion. I’m not necessarily going to get abusive simply because some living thing is especially dumb. But respect for living things isn’t going to be gained by giving everyone the impression that your group is a tad insane.
Sometimes I am quite embarrassed on behalf of these folks.
I lowered my milk consumption quite a bit, while I was a lacto-ovo vegetarian, once I considered more and more that mammals just weren’t meant to drink it after a certain age. Not to mention those pics of cows with udders so grotesquely huge that they drag the ground made me want to puke. I don’t know how often that happens in reality, but if it happens at all, something is wrong. Marion Nestle PhD also made a point in one of her books that dairy is pushed in the USA a lot because of calcium content and osteoporosis, yet cultures that don’t consume dairy have fewer cases of osteoporosis and related conditions than exist in the USA.
However I am not immune to dairy’s influence. I don’t have lactose intolerance,and I have to guess that’s [at least ] in part due to my European genetics. I take a bit in my coffee and the now quite infrequent splurge on ice cream, dairy is not a big part of my life. I used to use soymilk but I avoid un-fermented soy now for lots of reasons, and almond, sunflower and hemp milks just suck in coffee. They curdle and taste sour.
Anyway, in the end, I went back to limited meats instead. If any food group is unnecessary, it is dairy.
Couple of thoughts:
1) the European version of the Holstein, known as a Friesian, is bred for both meat and milk. One would assume that they’ve retained their mothering instincts. BTW: my neighbor had a herd of Holsteins for many years and they didn’t seem to have any problem raising their calves. I’m wondering whether there isn’t some breed variation among those cows used in big dairy and the well-pastured, grass-fed beasts of the small American farmer.
2) I’ve seen on-line queries asking for examples of evolution in modern humans. With a little thought, two have come to my mind: changes in brains size and robustness from Archaeic H. sap; and adult lactose tolerance among certain groups of modern H. saps. This last has arisen independently in Europe, Arabia and several parts of Africa–usually, if not always, with the advent of and reliance upon pastoralism. Likewise, gluten intolerance (particularly wheat gluten), is most common among those European ethnic groups who substituted the potato for grain in their diets–this last mutation occurred during historic times.
They can mother calves. It’s just they really don’t do well if they are forced to mother them and be required to watch over them all the time.
These are very lazy cows, and they, almost like giraffes, are notorious for not paying as close attention to them, which means that coyotes very easily can get them. Other cattle– like black Angus– pay much more attention to their calves.
These are called Frisian cattle in Britain. The improved dairy strain is called the British Frisian. In its native land, it’s the Holstein-Frisian.
Strangely they were developed right in the middle of where the Funnelbeaker culture was developed.
My farmer friend wasn’t a purist. Every few generations, he’d out-cross to another breed like the young Short-horn bull that got loose and ended up in his pasture one year. He just called up the owner, offered him a fair price and bingo he had a new bull. He also usually crossed his heifers to Angus bulls to reduce the size of the calves for these first timers. Most of the calves from this cross were sold for meat although he occasionally kept a heifer. And he always let it happen naturally–no 25 year old frozen semen for his cows. I assume that they didn’t produce as much milk as the factory cows, but their udders didn’t drag on the ground either and they seemed to be pretty contented.
Shorthorns were the dairy breed for small farmers all over the country.
In WV, they are all called Durhams, because that’s where they were originally improved.
There are definitely improvements that need to be made in the welfare of dairy cattle. But I also don’t get the hand-wringing over cows not being allowed to raise their calves. It really doesn’t bother them that much, and has always struck me as pure anthropomorphism.
The birthing process itself, especially for a first-timer, is a lot more stressful than having the calf removed. And young calves get to hang out and play together, they don’t seem to miss their mother’s, either. Meanwhile, as soon as mom gets back to her comfortable routine of grazing/milking/hanging out with friends, she gets over it very quickly, if she was sad about losing her calf at all.
I personally choose Tillamook dairy products whenever possible. The cheese is outstanding, and the milk come from farm coops of small-to-medium-sized farms where the cattle get daily grazing. Avoids the huge feed lot experience you see elsewhere. Plus, I’ve actually seen the cows and toured the factory where it’s made.
This has actually not been my experience with dairy cows at all. The ones I have seen that are allowed to mother, do so very willingly, though the first time mothers sometimes don’t know quite what to do. Sometimes other females in the same enclosure help groom the calf when it is born. I have also seen females adopt calves that aren’t their own – even if they aren’t lactating – but protect and nurture them, and maintain those bonds for years (a cow can live 15 – 20 years). They have also been known to “adopt” or at least form close bonds with other species such as goats or sheep.
Most religious animal rights activists (and it does become like a religion) are very silly.