A colleague of mine recentley claimed that if you don’t milk dairy cows they die. I immediatley pronounced this as ‘bollocks’ but after a few more people got involved in the dicussion doubt started to set in. Someone speculated that because they were bred specifically to be milked they may have some kind of genetic fault that means they can’t stop producing milk, I still think it is rubbish but I can’t find any proof online - any vets out there with the straightdope?
During the Icestorm, I lived in the Ottawa Valley. Farmers from the rural areas lost a lot of their stock - sheep, and dairy cows, mainly. Some areas had no power for almost a month and a few weeks. Large dairy farms had a lot of trouble since the cows could not be milked, and doing the job by hand was going to require a lot of help. Interestingly, some military personnel was dispatched to help out.
If memory serves. A cow that is not milked will suffer something fierce - and many were put down for that reason. I’m not sure if anything explodes (ha ha ha) if a cow is not milked… but maybe chique (who has grown up on a cattle farm) can answer that part of the question…
I don’t think it’s because they can’t stop producing milk, but because they have been breeded to produce an abnormally huge volume of milk.
I don’t know if it’s still true, but dairy cows used to have to be bred, yearly I think, to keep producing milk. The result was “drop” calves, which could be bought cheap by individuals and hand-fed then raised for slaughter.
I’m sure it’s done now with hormones (or the like) now.
Peace,
mangeorge
Just a quick note about the English verb “to breed.” The past tense and past participle of the verb is “bred” so your sentence should read “… because they have been bred to produce…”
This is intended as an aid and not a criticism. I think your English is generally excellent.
Thank you. I appreciate the correction (though I’m likely to forget it next time 
)
Sorry for appearing to desert my post (makes me sound like a cowardly soldier doesn’t it?) but I posted at work and then came home to find my laptop had been taken by my girlfriend! Thanks for all the information guys - looks like I stand corrected, now do I take this into work and own up or just pretend it didn’t happen?
Just kidding, of course I’ll tell.
Act nonchalant and change the subject is the way I handle such situations.
I’m actually going to disagree here and state that the fact that a cow is not milked does not cause death. It causes quite a bit of discomfort, to be sure, but not death. Cows must be bred yearly in a process known as “freshening” or milk production will taper off and eventually cease entirely. http://www.vegansociety.com/html/animals/exploitation/cows/dairy_cow.php
http://64.233.161.104/search?q=cache:DDsuQlylYDQJ:www.arthurrankcentre.org.uk/arc3/attachments/view/112/31%20Dairy%20cow%20life%20cycle.pdf+life+of+a+dairy+cow&hl=en
Prior to calving, cows are “dried off” in a process wherein milking is ceased and the production of milk halts.
http://www.moomilk.com/archive/prod-22.htm
And as evidence that not milking a cow does not lead to death,
http://www.najah.edu/english/reports/report13.htm
I’m going to hazard a guess that the deaths of the cattle in the blizzard may have resulted from frostbite or winter teat end lesions on their teats which allowed infections such as mastitis to set in. With regular milking, this damage would have been detected early on and it’s standard practice to treat each cow with a teat-dip following each milking to prevent such infections. Death wouldn’t occur as a result of either of these, but the cow’s usefullness as a milk producer would be at an end and hence the afflicted cattle would probably be slaughtered.
And to correct my own post, it seems that if mastitis is caused by E. coli then death may indeed result.
This is the reply to the email I cheekily fired off to the William H Miner Agricultural Research Institute:
Dear Will:
Your question was forwarded to me. Whether or not cows will die if they’re not milked depends on two factors: How much they’re milking at the time, and how fast milking ceases. If a cow is only producing 20 pounds per day or less per day, she can be “dried off” (caused to cease milk production) simply by stopping milking her. That happens to almost every cow every year, and is a normal part of the “have a calf–produce a lot of milk per day—milk less and less per day–dry off–have a calf” cycle that’s a cow’s life. Done right, there’s no problem at all.
However, if a cow is producing much more than 20 pounds per day, stopping milking her in one fell swoop will cause severe udder stress including inflammation, and the more she’s milking the greater the chance that this stress and the resulting infection could kill her. Unfortunately, we have first-hand experience about this in this region (45 miles south of Montreal) since a few years ago we had a devastating ice storm that killed electric power for several days. One farmer who couldn’t get a generator lost a bunch of high producing cows when he wasn’t able to milk them. (He had about 150 cows, and milking by hand was out of the question.)
So a short answer is yes–under some conditions.
Everett D. Thomas
William H. Miner Agricultural Research Institute
P.O. Box 90
Chazy, NY 12921-0090
Phone 518-846-8020 Ext. 115. FAX 518-846-8445
thomas@whminer.com