I don't disagree that this is the case, the point I was trying to make is that keeping animals like this is not optimal.
You could only have dairy farms in places that don't have a winter, but that would be pushing things even further toward the whole "put all the cattle in Californian factory farms and then burn lots and lots of oil to ship it around in trucks" thing, which is arguably even less optimal.
Factory farming in NL versus California is probably pretty similar. California's not really a great place for ranching in the first place though, better to just do that in a place like Vermont with a lot more water.
It's kind of like burning wood to heat your house: It may be traditional, but that doesn't necessarily make it better. Realistically, the only reason all sorts of traditional practices were sustainable way back when was that the human population used to be a fraction of what it is now.
It doesn't, but it's not meaningless either. It can be a useful heuristic, for example when trying to judge what conditions are better for the animals involved. Nature sucks in various ways, but 'unnatural' conditions that the animal is not adapted to living in often do cause more mental and physical distress.
They’d also come home from pastures at night. That’s where the tastier nutrient dense food was.