h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

The killing of unwanted calves so we can take the milk is not a new thing. I have read about it in a book on Icelandic Crofting in the late 19th century. I've heard about hobby goat farmers killing the males in the 1930s.

A farmer has to make money, and in the UK they don't generally make a lot of money, and many are going out of business. (Ref) http://www.farmersguardian.com/home/business/business-news/farmers-quit-in-droves-as-milk-price-dives/33604.article due to the fact of being squeezed out for low milk prices.

The average dairy farm income, before paying any expenses was £42, 000 in the UK http://www.dairyco.org.uk/datum/on-farm-data/cull-cow-prices/gb-cull-cow-prices.aspx That's not what the farmer takes home to live on, it's the money before the cattle feed, the salary of any workers, the equipment and so on. We're not talking big agribusiness here, we're talking a small business, the average dairy farmer is not a rich person. (For USAians someone on the minimum wage for 1 year will get £11000 a year for a 35 hour week).

The BBC informs me that a farmer gets about 20p for a pint of milk, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/8103119.stm, google tells me that a calf will drink 5l of milk a day, for about 5 months. That's about £114 that goes to feed the calf instead of milk that can be sold. Not really a problem just for one calf. But the average heard has 113 cows in it, so that's £12, 882 a year that would be lost if you left the calf with the mother until it was weaned instead of killing/selling it and taking the milk. That's around 1/4 of the total farm turn-over.

Ok so why not sell the calves to someone who wants to raise them? To someone else. Which is done, either for veal or for dairy beef, and many calves are sold for that. But the number of calves that can go for dairy beef depends on the demand for beef, and the price of beef. A beef farmer will make less money from dairy beef than from beef beef. That's because he has to pay for the cost of the first few months feed, and because dairy cattle have less muscle than beef cattle. Dairy beef will fetch less money. So if the cost of beef falls, then there will be less demand for beef cattle.

So if you are a dairy farmer you have to get 1 calf per cow per year. You can't afford to keep them with their mother because that mean a drop of about 1/4 in your total income. You'd like to sell it to the beef industry or to the veal industry. But if no one wishes to buy them you don't have much choice but to kill them.

Actually if we were to outlaw all cow slaughter, as parts of India have done we would still have dairy farmers, but milk would be at least twice as expensive, as we'd have to accommodate the cost of feeding all the male cattle, and the old age homes for elderly cattle. Or we'd have to devise a medication to give cows so that they can lactate without needing to produce a calf.

I have two thoughts about this.

First, I thought that a cow only has to give birth once and will then give milk in perpetuity as long as it is milked daily.

Second, I would have thought that the industry would have found a way by now to induce milk production via some sort of hormone stimulation rather than through physical birth.

According to Wikipedia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dairy_cattle

'Production levels peak at around 40 to 60 days after calving.[19] The cow is then bred. Production declines steadily afterwards, until, at about 305 days after calving, the cow is 'dried off', and milking ceases. About sixty days later, one year after the birth of her previous calf, a cow will calve again.'

I'd have thought we could use homones as well, but I suspect that majority of people interested in ethical milk are also going to want a 'natural' or 'organic' product. I have thought of getting a cow and persuading a vet to experiment with hormones, and getting some milk, but it's cheese i miss really not milk.

then perhaps some form of artificial insemination where they first wean out all the male sperm thus providing a much higher yeald of female calves?

""so why don't they just raise the calves until they are no longer veal?"

Probably because it would be uneconomical for the agrobusiness.""

Because they are dairy bullocks, not beef bullocks. Dairy bullocks won't put enough bulk on quickly enough to make them economical to raise. That's why we have different breeds - dairy cows are breed for high milk yield, beef for bulking out quickly.

Oh, and veal is lovely. We used to eat a lot of it, back when we had a tame restaurant-supplier butcher.

I know this is a serious conversation, and the reference links are good, but I do find it amusing when anyone references something in Wikipedia

Pretty much every single source of information we have is biased and often not fact checked. Especially the press and television documentaries. I've lost count of the times when things go out as a documentary only to later be shown to be staged either knowingly or unwittingly.

That aside...

Yes, dairy calves are killed. Yes I drink milk and eat veal. Do I have a problem with it? No.

However, I there's one aspect of the complaints that I think is overlooked. Sometime you can't *not* see something on the telly.
Here's an example, but this isn't telly... Most Saturdays in the high street there's a stall of people campaigning for anti-vivisection. They have posters hanging from the front of their trestle tables with photos of animals in laboratories, with their eyes stitched up, their brains wired up etc. Yes, they're pretty gruesome and designed to be used as shock tactics. All well and good except this is the high street, you know, the one crowded with little kids? Parents out shopping with their four or five year old kids, who thanks to these unintelligent, self-centered, ignorant and completely oblivious idiots, these kids are gonna get nightmares. I've asked them about this before, and the stock response I get is "well the world isn't fair" or "they should know". It's not these idiots that have to deal with the fall out from this, it's the parents.
A couple of years ago a film came out, Jack and Sarah Make a Porno. At least I think those were the names. Yes, lovely titled, advertised on buses up and down the length of the country, leaving parents having to explain to their kids what a porno was.

The problem is that we can't get away from advertising, documentaries, the press. It's everywhere. So those that are responsible for it need to be just that, responsible.

I did try and get reasonable stats to back up my arguments, most of them were from fairly reliable sources, ie UK government department of agriculture sources, only one came from Wikipedia.

The documentary concerned was shown at 9.30pm. So we're not talking a time when small children should be up. Now the high street people.. the issue is they're wrong.

I was anti-vivisection until one day at Uni one of my friends said, 'I do animal testing and it's ok, just come into my lab and I'll show you, and I went in and had a look, and it was fine'. It turned out that the stuff shown on the high street was basically all rubbish. Now I'm ok with it, if it's going to save lives.

I love arguing with them, a lot of them eat meat you know... which is a fairly logically untenable position. Though a lot of them are vegan and I do take them seriously.

i agree, Pastey... to the point that they actually could have some sort of action prohibiting them from displaying 'obscene' , psychologically damaging, or inappropriate for children... type of images...

seems like that could actually be on the books already if the law is 'read' correctly...

I could understand if this was on a children's TV show with talking animals, or even if it was earlier in the evening.

But at 9.30pm?

just want to add that, although the lab folks you met, Z, showed you stuff you approved of...
there are plenty of lab folks out there who are not caring for the welfare of the creatures they are experimenting on....
the antivivisectionists, though they might be oblivious and insensitive to children's sensitivities, may not otherwise be wrong... but actually right... in trying to defend these creatures that up until recently NOone was defending...

behind closed doors lots of evil occurs...

I agree with animal testing for the sake of medicine
I do not agree with testing for the sake of vanity
I eat meat locally sorced in the hopes this means it's treated better
and I only buy free range eggs in the hope that the chicken actually is free range
but I get very very worried when i hear talks about "super dairy farms"

They weren't caring for animal welfare because they were kind people, they were doing so because they were required to by law, which was thoroughly enforced.

I agree with Dr Anthea, I'm pleased that animal testing of cosmetics is soon being outlawed throughout the EU. Good luck with it.

I stood on a snail this morning. I'm wondering, from an ethical point of view, whether that's worse than eating a snail?

did you knowingly premeditated step on the snail?
you could say you were defending other life, that of plants,
perhaps the dead remains of said snail went to feed starving birds

With regard the accuracy of wikipedia "The free online resource Wikipedia is about as accurate on science as the Encyclopedia Britannica, a study shows. The British journal Nature examined a range of scientific entries on both works of reference and found few differences in accuracy."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4530930.stm

ps I heard that h2g2 could have gone the way of wikipedia and apparently it had a head start.

wikipedia and h2g2 cannot be compared... they are like apples and oranges... and they are not in competition... and they both serve a purpose.

also, trying to make h2g2 like wikipedia will destroy h2g2

Did anyone see the film "Fast Food Nation" dir. R Linklater (2006)?

The ending part of the film was pretty sudden and graphic where you get to see beef cattle being processed. The story revolves around a fast food corporate marketing exec investigating the cause of contamination in their burgers. It's a film I can recommend.

"... they are like apples and oranges ..."

To be fair I prefer strawberries

oohh yessss