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Comment by ThrowawayIP | Hacker News Reader

This is ethics-washing. FTA: "Since October 2016 our calves have stayed with their mothers for 5 to 6 months."

What happens month 7?

Some are sent for slaughter, of course. Clearly, this does not address the ethical concerns of people who consider slaughtering animals for human feed is unethical; only the concerns of the people who consider separating a calf from its mother before it is weaned, and sending the calf for slaughter at that time, is unethical.

Why is that the unethical "tipping-point"? Why doesn't this farm address the other ethical issues with dairy farming like Sexual Assault, Forced Pregnancy, Mutilation, Infanticide, or Murder?

The answer is that it would not be profitable. This whole venture, stem to stern, is a lesson in ethics-washing.

In the case of animals those are known, as I'm sure you are fully aware, as Artificial Insemination and Slaughtering.

Your point seems to be that anything done to an animal is just as bad as doing it to a human. I'm not sure you can apply human ethics codes to animals. The animals certainly don't apply it to each other.

If a bull mounts a cow and the cow is clearly not participating by choice, would you put the bull on trial for rape in front of a cattle Jury?

"Sexual assault", "infanticide", "forced pregnancy" and "murder", these are terms that are normally used to mean something that a human does to another human, not another kind of animal.

I'm curious, but would you call what male cats do to female cats "sexual assault"? Or what cats do to mice, "murder"?

I'm asking because the reason that "murder", in particular, is usually only applied to human behaviour is because a human motive is usually assumed, i.e. either some sort of emotion like anger etc, or financial or other profit. Conversely most people don't believe that animals can have other motives for killing other animals than to eat them (yet check out "surplus killing" on wikipedia). So I'd say that killing another animal to eat it seems to only be interpreted as "murder" when it's done by a human, which sounds like it's motivated from reasons other than to succinctly and precisely define a certain behaviour.

> What happens month 7?

What happens is they eat solid food and no longer need to nurse. See: https://animals.mom.com/happens-dont-wean-calves-9821.html

If you give them milk they'll drink it, but they don't need it anymore.

Well. Eventually you do have to kill some and eat them. Otherwise they will just keep breeding and take up all available space.

Dairy farmers? Seems unlikely.

You're joking but you'd be surprised. Apparently, all people of Indo-European descent are the descendants of ancient dairy farmers. Who bred, and bred, and bred- and took up, well, a lot of the available space. And dairy (rather, the ability to digest it) seems to have been a major reason for that taking-over.

Incidentally, are you Greek?

Fascinating, thanks! :)

I'm not Greek.

You're welcome and sorry- I thought your username was a play on words that would have made some sense in Greek.

I'm learning Greek. Curious what play on words that would be? In English it reads as a portmanteau of "cat" and "naturopath"

Ah, I see. It's a bit offensive really, sorry about that, but "catur-" sounds like the root for "κατούρημα", a slightly vulgar way to say "peeing". I thought you were kind of taking the piss off naturopaths. :-)

The kind of milk you get from males isn't exactly something most people would want to consume...

Dairy farms send their cattle to slaughter as well. It just happens on a different timescale for the females.

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