- 7 Posts
- 8 Comments
0·1 year agoMost what? Calves or male calves? Because it’s factually incorrect to say that most male calves aren’t killed for veal. They evidently are.
But let’s ignore that for a second. The fact that any calves in the dairy industry are killed for veal, or even for beef (at only a few years older, still a fraction of their natural lifespan), is of course a harm, whether you agree with it or not. Killing an animal is harming them, no matter if they’re a baby animal or a few-year-old animal.
It’s a harm toward animals that some might justify as a necessary component of dairy production, which it is. But this ignores the fact that dairy production itself isn’t necessary. And that was the crux of the fallacy I’m alluding to.
USDA is inherently biased toward animal farming, and the first source I linked was a scientific study. But I’m not necessarily denying what USDA says. Holding a bias doesn’t automatically make something untrue. You didn’t quote anything they said, you made some hasty calculations based on their statistics, which seemed to overlook the distinction between male calves and female calves. You used this to make a statement that I never disagreed with, because I was making a different one. (One could call that a strawman fallacy).
Humane League is an animal welfare organisation. Of course they’re going to focus on the most ethically unsound aspects of animal farming, since that’s their purpose, but nothing they said was false. They did acknowledge that some male calves in the dairy industry are raised for beef, but that most are killed for veal.
I’m sorry but your math doesn’t reflect the reality of most dairy farms. The male calves are indeed mainly killed for veal. And I didn’t say most calves are killed for veal, I said most male calves. Indeed, most female calves are raised to become dairy cows, and some male calves are raised to become beef cows, or bulls used for their semen for artificially inseminating dairy cows, or in some cases for mating.
Overall you might say then that most calves are raised until a few years old for slaughter, either as dairy cows, dairy bulls or beef cattle (keep in mind they can live until 20-25 years), but most male calves are killed as babies for veal.
“Because male cattle cannot produce milk, dairy producers treat these animals as disposable—or “surplus.” Some are sold to be raised for beef, likely on crowded feedlots with up to 150,000 cattle crammed into filthy enclosures. Others—in fact, the majority—will be sold for veal. The remaining calves will be killed shortly after birth.”
Actually almost all male calves do (in the dairy industry), because they can’t produce milk and it wouldn’t be profitable or financially feasible to keep them alive otherwise
“Male dairy calves are surplus to the requirement of dairy production, and thus, are often sold from the dairy farm in early life. In the United States, male calves are generally sold within days of birth (Shivley et al., 2019) for veal or dairy beef production (Perdue and Hamer, 2017). Raising young male dairy calves for meat, particularly veal, is a contentious issue that has received public scrutiny in the United States (e.g., California Prop 2, 2008) and globally (reviewed by Bolton and von Keyserlingk, 2021).”
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fanim.2022.1000897/full
I can provide an example, but you might hate me for it. I swear this is just to explain what I mean by this fallacy because I can’t think of another example right now.
Justifying killing/using an animal for its skin/hide (e.g. leather or fur), because you’re already killing the animal for its flesh, when in actual fact the killing of the animal doesn’t need to take place at all (hypothetically).
Or justifying the killing of calves for veal as a necessary component of dairy production, when in fact dairy production isn’t necessary, either.
I hope that makes sense
Just out of interest, what if we make it a (not-human) animal instead of a human? Or, what if we make it trillions of animals every year. What about a world that doesn’t require it but still includes mass amounts of animal sacrifice unnecessarily? That’s the world we’re in right now 😂
It’s absolutely necessary to kill cattle for meat in the dairy industry. It would not be financially viable otherwise, and small-scale farms that try to avoid this practice can’t provide enough dairy to feed the human population if they’re consuming dairy; and they still involve other unavoidable cruelties inherent in taking the milk designed for calves, separating them and selectively breeding cows to overproduce milk, docking and debudding them, etc etc.