Fun fact, cheese is not always vegetarian. It can (quite often) contain animal rennet (from the inside of a young cow stomage, the cow needs to die for this)
I’m not bringing any moral value, just the note that synthetic remnet is cheaper then real one, another commenter said that about 60% of cheeses use it,i thought it would be much more.
As a person who check all cheese in the supermarket for this. The current state (EU/NL) is almost 60%, 60% of the cheese in our supermarket is without murdering baby cows. Which I up from last year, and it has been trending up for a while.
I have no clue how other countries are doing, my guess us worse. Some france people still label ‘Fish’ as ‘Vegan’
That number moves much closer to 0% if you start counting the baby cows killed in order to keep their mothers perpetually lactating, rather than just those whose bodies were used as a direct ingredient.
A cow will be impregnated 6-8 times during her life on a typical dairy farm, before she is killed af half her natural lifespan to be replaced by a younger cow. One of those baby cows will be raised as that replacement cow, the rest will be killed shortly after birth.
Killing baby cows is an inherent part of cow-milk production.
It’s highly market-senstive what happens to them, but I have previously worked on dairy farms in NZ and AU, and in both countries, calves(except replacement heifers) that get raised at all are a rounding error, maybe a handful per farm that are kept for personal slaughter and consumption.
If the bobby-calf (aka veal) market is paying well enough, then they are shipped off for slaughter at ~4 days old. If the market doesnt pay well enough to justify 4 days of rearing costs, then they are killed immediately and sold for their skins.
Fun fact, cheese is not always vegetarian. It can (quite often) contain animal rennet (from the inside of a young cow stomage, the cow needs to die for this)
i think most of the industry uses synthetic remnet.
That would be huge news if true but it doesn’t sound like you have a source
I’m not bringing any moral value, just the note that synthetic remnet is cheaper then real one, another commenter said that about 60% of cheeses use it,i thought it would be much more.
As a person who check all cheese in the supermarket for this. The current state (EU/NL) is almost 60%, 60% of the cheese in our supermarket is without murdering baby cows. Which I up from last year, and it has been trending up for a while.
I have no clue how other countries are doing, my guess us worse. Some france people still label ‘Fish’ as ‘Vegan’
That number moves much closer to 0% if you start counting the baby cows killed in order to keep their mothers perpetually lactating, rather than just those whose bodies were used as a direct ingredient.
A cow will be impregnated 6-8 times during her life on a typical dairy farm, before she is killed af half her natural lifespan to be replaced by a younger cow. One of those baby cows will be raised as that replacement cow, the rest will be killed shortly after birth.
Killing baby cows is an inherent part of cow-milk production.
most dairy calves are brought to full weight before slaughter.
a man who has never eaten veal.
hardly any dairy calves end up as veal.
the math
https://www.ers.usda.gov/webdocs/DataFiles/48685/milkcowsandprod.xlsx?v=1413.4
https://catalog.data.gov/dataset/livestock-meat-domestic-data/resource/257788c4-e153-4712-abf3-f2f339bbefec
4.722204129486094
It’s highly market-senstive what happens to them, but I have previously worked on dairy farms in NZ and AU, and in both countries, calves(except replacement heifers) that get raised at all are a rounding error, maybe a handful per farm that are kept for personal slaughter and consumption.
If the bobby-calf (aka veal) market is paying well enough, then they are shipped off for slaughter at ~4 days old. If the market doesnt pay well enough to justify 4 days of rearing costs, then they are killed immediately and sold for their skins.
i present the math below
a dairy cows life span is like 5 years
ours were closer to twelve but go off the documentary you watched once
https://albertamilk.com/ask-dairy-farmer/how-long-does-the-average-dairy-cow-live/
you are correct all of our cattle were born seven years old
it’s possible your operation was not average, and most dairy cows only live 5 years.
anecdotes are not data.