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.
