I think you could certainly argue that. Beef cows are slaughtered at around 3 years and diary cows are slaughtered at around 5 years but after giving birth with their offspring taken away several times (both have about a 20 year life span).
Personally, I don't understand how vegetarians justify it as being much different in terms of animal cruelty. You're still paying into a system that's killing animals for your benefit.
Still a net improvement over buying milk and meat isn't it?
Also, people are vegetarian for all sorts of reasons. For some it's about eating meat, for some it's about animal cruelty, for some it's about environmental impact, and probably there's plenty of other reasons
Where does this end? Industrial farming kills insects. We obviously don't have the same amount of love for insects as we have for cows. But why should cows live and insects die?
This comes back to killing humans, one way or the other. How many insects are a foetus? Are poor people not allowed to have children so that insects can keep on living?
Instead of doing nothing because there aren't any perfect solutions, start by aiming to minimise harm when there's realistic options to do so? e.g. avoid cow milk in favour of oat or soy milk.
Dairy cows eat crops from industrial farming as well so if you're concerned about insects dying, less diary will likely help e.g. you could make milk directly from soy beans instead of feeding them to cows.
So for me, it ends at the meat and diary have a huge negative impact on the environment and I’ll do my best to reduce my share by avoiding meat and diary.
US waste and exports make it hard to sanity check these numbers, but in 2018 there where 31.4 Million beef cows in US vs 9.4 milk cows adjusting for longer lifespan that’s possibly a 5.5:1 ratio.
For total milk production from Wikipedia “ The United States dairy herd produced 84.2 billion kilograms (185.7 billion pounds) of milk in 2007” https://www.statista.com/statistics/194302/number-of-beef-an.... Lists numbers of beef and dairy cows.
185.7 billion lb / 9.4 million cows = ~20,000 lb per year * ~5 year lifespan ~100k lb. https://albertamilk.com/ask-dairy-farmer/how-long-does-the-a... However, I am not sure it’s a clear comparison as this may be excluding calf’s from these counts. Which would drop lifetime production closer to 60,000lb and better line up with other sources.
https://extension.sdstate.edu/how-much-meat-can-you-expect-f... Suggest a typical cow at 490 lb of beef and this https://www.nationalchickencouncil.org/about-the-industry/st... gives annual beef consumption of 58.1 lb beef per person per year (2019).
PS: Of note dairy cows are also consumed for meat, though generally of lower quality. Which further muddles the issue suggesting that reducing milk consumption might simply increase the number of beef cattle ~1:1 to compensate.
I've been vegan for years and I wish people wouldn't take this position publicly.
I agree with you, but it's more effective to have lots of people consuming fewer animal products than a few people cutting out animal products "100%". (Of course it's never 100%, that'd be impossible unless you left society.)
Let's be optimistic about the amount of change that normal people can do instead of chastising allies for not doing enough.