*Commercial milk, local farms with humane practices still exist and the milk tends to taste like real milk too, not the sour pus stuff most Americans are familiar with.
Also milk = rape is totally factual (though a terrible way to try to reach the public)
- Bulls are immobilized and forcibly masturbated in order to gather sperm.
- Cows are then forcibly inseminated to be pregnant back to back during their lives so they produce milk. This also typically involves restraining the cow in some chute and shoving an arm up the her ass to hold the cervix in place during the process.
So if you believe that non-human animals can be SA’d the dairy industry most likely covers that definition.
You can look this stuff up yourself in industry sources, it’s just industry practice including free-range cows.
FosterMolasses@leminal.space 3 days ago
nooch@lemmy.vg 3 days ago
These practices are not particular to factory farms. Some farms do keep bulls but this is costly and impractical on the long run for genetic diversity reasons, so most non-factory farms also buy sperm and do the artificial insemination.
Also “local” as an adjective doesn’t mean much in terms of practices. All farms are local to somewhere. In a 50km radius of where I live there have been investigations in at least 10 farms that found severe animal abuse and neglect in the last 5 years. Those were all local farms that got to put a nice local stamp in their products.
Waraugh@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 days ago
That isn’t true, of you regularly milk a cow there is no reason to impregnate it again. The cow will continue producing milk as long as it’s regularly milked . It’s the same as human woman, that’s how you end up with some mothers breastfeeding for a creepily long time. Our own species behaves in the same exact way, why does this continue to get repeated.
nooch@lemmy.vg 3 days ago
Yes the dairy cycle is more complex I simplified it because I wanted to focus the impregnation part.
Milk production decreases greatly after the first 9-12 months. To make it profitable they do get impregnated repeatedly. The life of a dairy cow typically goes like this:
The cycle is then repeated. Since pregnancy and milk production is taxing on the body and milk production declines, most cows get slaughtered at 5 years old with an average of 2.5 pregancies (average lifespan is 20 years). This also makes sense because to maintain the herd you need to keep the number of females stable, which have a 50% chance of being born (male claves get slaughtered ofc).
Maybe some homesteads or subsistence farms keep milking them for years after one pregnancy, but otherwise even for free range grass fed whatever, if they sell milk to make a profit this is how it goes.
You can get all this info from industry sources.