Milk not associated to cow slaughter

Question

Is it possible to purchase milk, perhaps at an increased price, that carries the label that no cow slaughter is carried out at the dairy (and, you pay, for the cows to be fed as they later age and no longer carry milk)?

Can you provide some images, displaying the items?

Answer 1

Entrepreneurs will do whatever it takes to make money and sugar coat the story. The reality is that even if no slaughtering may not be involved, please consider the following:

• Cows must still be (unwillingly) impregnated, so they can get pregnant and produce milk
• Cow's milk will be stolen from the baby calf so it can be sold to humans
• Cows milk production drastically drops after they age and go through few cycles (which is why slaughter is common practice)
• Even if slaughtering isn't directly happening on the farm you're purchasing this milk from, they may have other mechanisms (that are for example used in India), where the farm is selling the cow to another company/entity that slaughters them later on anyway (for meat or leather).

In my opinion, if the intention is to eliminate or reduce the suffering of cows, then slaughtering isn't the worst thing they experience (in my opinion). I think that the suffering comes mostly from sadness for their children that were taken away and being raped/imprisoned for their entire life. They are constantly in this 'cycle' without any choice whatsoever, they can't even kill themselves if they wanted to.

While I think there might be some extraordinary scenario where we could use the extra milk that cow doesn't need and they live in a total freedom and good life, the milk price in this scenario would be very large, like 1000 USD per litre. There's also no good reason why we would need such a substance as nowadays cow's milk is obsolete for humans.

Answer 2

What you can purchase depends to a large extent on where you live.

In the United Kingdom for instance, Ahimsa sells slaughter free milk. Unfortunately their milk and milk products are currently in very short supply.

I imagine the price of the milk is much more affected by having to allow male cows to live out their lives without being killed shortly after birth since will not produce any milk at all so there's an inbuilt 100% increase in cost from that.

Answer 3

As a summary: if slaughter of the cow which is the direct milk source is your only concern, then it might be possible to buy such milk. However, this does not mean at all that the milk is cruelty-free, see answer above. Also consider that calves which become dairy cows are often bought from companies which use inhumane practices.

Answer 4

It is commercially improbable that a business can keep cows living for 15+ years while their produce lifetime is between 6-8 years. The growing area to keep them outside the slaughtering house is economically impractical.

Also if considering that cows only produce milk while having calves it should be a large number of animals to keep in a span of 15 years.

Starting from a single cow, in 15 years of production it would have at least 15 other animals since a cow must have one calf per year to produce milk. On a small production scale, 20 active cows would generate another 225 animals to be taken care in 15 years.