sobering thoughts

[amnesiadust]

I might've mentioned to some of you that I just finished reading Gandhi's autobiography, The Story of My Experiments with Truth (1925). There were plenty of things I didn't know about him and his personal idiosyncrasies which I got from this book, and one of these was that he was a pretty hard-core vegan, and basically ate nothing but fruits and

Comments

good point, but...

[amnesiadust]

Actually, that's something I wondered about too. The amount of milk a cow produces, and the length of time for which she produces it, seems to depend on many factors, not the least of which is how often you milk her. I found a few sets of lecture notes from biology/agriculture classes which got into plenty of detail about comparative biology of lactation in bovines and humans.

But we can still ask about ballpark averages or targets for the dairy industry. This article (the point of which appears to be that rBST and rBGH aren't harmful when consumed by humans, a point I'm not really out to dispute) tells us: "After having a calf, a cow produces milk for about 300 days. The highest daily milk production will occur at about 8 weeks after calving and then the level of milk production per day gradually declines during the rest of the lactation period." It makes practical sense too -- what biological advantage is there in continuing to produce milk after the young are weaned? This document goes into rather ridiculous detail on the physiological processes involved, but I think it's enough to establish that it happens.

So if we believe all that, it means a dairy cow needs to have a calf about once per year to keep up milk production. This page mentions that the average lifespan of a dairy cow is 4 lactations, or 4 calves. (Or four years -- rather short of what I'd expect their natural lifespan to be.) If each cow replaces itself in the herd with a calf, that means around 3/4 of the calves are surplus. Something must happen to them, and it probably isn't good.