Milk production is performed by making cows pregnant repeatedly (about once per year I think) throughout their lives and then killing most of their calves. Once the mother cow is worn out from all the births, they too are killed.

Male calves are usually sold for meat (veal). Cows that cannot produce sufficient milk are sold for beef.

This is objectionable if you find any of the meat farming practices objectionable, but whey itself does not necessitate killing anything.

A replacement rate breeding program for cows that rotates dairy production is probably possible. It's just not what we seem to want.

Milk cows are not generally used for meat. That is a different breed of cows. Milk cows almost never have male offspring - with AI we can control to ensure only female calf's are born (IIRC this is about 97% accurate so a few males are born). A few great milk producing mothers will be given sperm that is male only thus ensuring enough bulls to provide fathers and improving genetics for the next generations.

If AI means "Artificial Insemination" I believe you.

If AI means "Artificial Intelligence" I do not believe you.

The first.

> whey itself does not necessitate killing anything.

This is assuming that people would eat calves if they weren't killed so that we can take their milk.

You're right, but I think about it the other direction. We currently _do_ eat the calves that _are_ killed so we can take their milk.

We _could_ (probably) figure out a way to not require killing them, I just don't know what that would be.

Back of the envelope math: cows live for about 20 years, but dairy cows are killed after about 4 years when their milk production slows. Assuming they are impregnated 4 times, that's (5 cows * 20 years per cow) / (4 years) = 25 times as costly. And this 25 times as costly milk has to compete with the 1 times as costly milk in a market that's already so competative that milk is sold below cost with government subsidies. It's impossible for practical purposes.

If you're comparing today's market, practices, and subsidies (which are all just measurements of the same signal) to a fictional world where we didn't want to kill any calfs, but using today's subsidies and prices, then I think that's not a fair comparison.

If god appeared and said that the Hindus were right all along and cows are sacred and milk is their gift to us - we'd do it just fine.

All factory farming has some horrific stories to tell.

Not sure I'd single out whey. It is really all dairy.

And, all chicken, all beef, etc... If you dig into the actual mechanisms of how harvesting is done, it is a horror show.

Mass killing is bloody and horrific.

We do it anyway.

When I sit down and think about the amount of murder required to maintain any omnivorous or carnivorous creature, it's really a mindwarp. I (at least) have been quite separated from it my whole life, until I started hunting, really.

Wolves and large carnivores especially are just brutal. They will take your children down and eat them alive in front of you. Fair exchange we drive them off and kill you quickly, is at least one way of looking at it. But there's no "pleasant" way of looking at any of it.