I’m more likely to wind up in gastric distress from a bunch of beans, fruit and veggies than from a steak and some dairy. Ispo facto presto chango, cow milk is for me. Also, cows are for me.
Edit: I should specify that I don’t mean this as a taunt (I roll my eyes at the “Tell the vegan you’re eating a big burger!”) but a comment about how terrible this logic is. I mean, people are allergic to peanuts, gluten intolerant, and a whole range of other “plants must not be for people” digestive issues.
Something I don’t get. Magically, the “cow’s milk is for calves” people get their wish and no person/other animal drinks cow’s milk anymore. So what happens to the millions of dairy cows who are producing milk but don’t have calves (I know a cow has to have a calf to produce milk, but then the calf is taken and raised seperately and the cow goes back into the herd of milk cows.)
Farmers aren’t going to feed millions of animals who are producing an unwanted product. Domestic cattle aren’t adapted to survive in the wild. Dairy cattle aren’t prime meat animals and if people are anti-milk I’m sure they don’t want people eating beef either.
That is to say, it’s not as though everyone is suddenly going to become vegetarian or vegan. A plausible scenario is that demand for meat and dairy goes down as the proportion of vegetarians and vegans gradually goes up and meat substitutes like beyond beef become more popular.
These things are already happening but AIUI are still largely cancelled out by increasing meat consumption by the rest of us. However, eventually we’d expect that the demand for meat and dairy may go down.
And in such a scenario, farmers would just breed fewer meat and/or dairy cows. Since it won’t happen overnight, it’s not a huge problem.
Industrial milk production is cruel to the cows but it has nothing on veal calf production for cruelty.
Home or small-herd dairying is, as far as I have experienced, fairly pleasant as livestock lives go. The cows lead pampered lives by and large, and instead of being turned into burger after two or three years of maximally-induced production, they are more like 10 to 12 years when they are culled.
I think you should re-examine that “nature intended” thing. Like other animals but much much more so, we manipulate our environment for our own ends. Nature intended this too.
My calves are about average size for someone with my fitness level. I drink about 8 ounces of lactose-free milk/day. If I exercise too hard, sometimes my calves will spasm – maybe I should drink more? Or, maybe it’s the lactose-free version that’s not helping my calves.
In any case, I would say that cow milk doesn’t seem to do anything special for my calves.
Er… no, usually that calf ends up as veal. Certainly nearly all the male calves do (you only need a very small number of bulls) and probably some of the female ones if the dairy herd doesn’t need to be enlarged.
Exactly - no one is going to support a herd of dairy cattle if no one is eating/drinking dairy. The variety dies out, because they aren’t suited to living in the wild, either, or being eaten as meat (and as you point out, the anti-dairy crowd are often anti-meat so there goes the beef cattle, too).
The unspoken end point here is the extinction of cattle.
My gf will allow veal in our house and bellies so long as it comes from one local source. It’s expensive, but it’s delicious. My gf took a tour of the farm.
Google gives over 5,700,000 hits for this. Somewhere between 2/3 and 3/4 of the world population can’t digest milk well or at all past weaning age. The people who retain this ability are pretty much European (particularly Northern European) or cattle-keeping cultures in Africa. It’s not impossible to find tolerance elsewhere, but it’s not common, either. Some cultures get around this by using mostly/only fermented/cultured dairy products where the lactose is broken down during aging. Others get around it by simply not using diary products other than human breast milk for infants.
