Is it morally wrong to take the cows milk.People in Asia have lived thousands of years on a lacto veg diet.?!
Is it morally wrong to take the cows milk.People in Asia have lived thousands of years on a lacto veg diet.?
In India especially also other Asian countries we find history going back thousands of years where the cows bulls and society have lived in a very natural sustainable manner.
Answers:
No way! Milking cows pays for my college tuition; so, I know what it's like! There's nothing morally wrong with it unless the farmer beats the cows, doesn't take care of them, or something like that. On the farms I work at, people treat their cows very well (good feed, water, comfortable stalls in the barns, etc.) because milk production goes down if the cows aren't treated as well, and if a cow is mistreated often, it can become scared and more likely to kick whoever tries to milk it. So, it pays to treat cows well which all of the farmers I have worked for do.
Also, the cows give milk for such a long time, and the calves don't really need it all. It's good that the extra milk isn't going to waste. At the farms I work at, we give the milk from the mother cow to only her calf for a few days right after the calf is born. We are very specific about how much milk the calf should get because it can cause scours or other illnesses in the calf, and ultimately, it is financially beneficial to prevent the calf's death because that calf will go to market in a week or so if it is a bull or it will become a milk cow on the farm if it is a heifer calf. Most calves will not even drink that much of the milk right after it is born, and after about three or four weeks, the calf is taken off of milk and able to drink water from a bucket or drinking cup.
Oh, and drinking cups are another story. They are in most barns, and all of the farms that I have worked at have drinking cups in each stall so that each cow can have water whenever it wants in the barn and there is usually one in each calf pen if there is not a big tank with a floater that refills the tank whenever any water is missing. The cow or calf puts it's nose in this little tub thing that holds maybe a gallon of water, and it's nose hits this button in the drinking cup that refills the water as the cow drinks. It's hard to describe drinking cups to city people, but I tried.
See, cows are treated humanely at most farms. I'm sure that there are exceptions like at those big corporate farms and maybe some of the largest freestall barns, but good farmers know that happy cows give the most milk. Keeping cows happy means that the farmer gets more milk which means that the farmer gets more money.
Oh, and I can tell that at least one of the other answerers has never worked on a farm! Cows are usually slaughtered when they are too old, have mastitis, stepped on teats, become downers, etc. There's usually a very good reason. Free martins are infertile heifers that had a male twin, and they cannot have calves which means that they can never get milk. No farmer is going to spend all of this money to feed a cow and give it a space in the barn if it will never give milk! A lot of the farmers on small farms don't waste their time with that hormone treatment (like BGH, for example) because it pushes the cow so hard for only a few years, and then the cow has issues a lot quicker than a cow that was never given hormones. Herds treated with hormones usually get replaced a lot quicker than one that hasn't because they are pushed so hard.
And one person milking 400 cows twice each day? If a farmer did that alone, he or she would go completely insane. It takes like 1.5 hours to milk a herd of about 50 cows alone, and then even longer if you have to stand by young cows so that they don't kick the milk machine off. Then after that, the farmer gets to go feed calves, repair machinery, get hay ready, etc. Even milking 400 cows twice each day on a parlor farm would send someone over the edge because the cow has to be milked properly--can't just quit before the cow is finished unless you want a herd full of sick cows. If a cow doesn't get milked all of the way, it gets mastitis and possibly other things! Farmers take the milkers off of the cow when all of the quarters on the cow's bag have a certain feel--it's hard to describe, but anyone with some experience milking cows can tell when the cow is done being milked. Cows get shipped to market if the farmer doesn't milk them all of the way, and if the cow has mastitis, it's not going to sell well. So, milking the cow until it is done is the best thing to prevent it from being shipped to the slaughterhouse in the first place.
Besides, if it really is wrong to milk cows, what are we going to do with all of them anyways? Release them into the wild and let them fend for themselves? Get eaten by grizzly bears maybe? That seems much more immoral to me.