What is a myth is the idea that cows must continuously give birth in order to produce milk when, in reality, they can produce milk for years without another birth. In terms of how dairy is produced today, I think that gets exaggerated as well, there are a lot of different types of dairy operations and no where near 99% of dairy is from intensive factory farms.
I think many would be interested and there are a number of small family farms that do this sort of thing so there is already a good deal of demand. For example, while modest, Californians voted for better living conditions for hens and this has resulted in a pretty sizable increase in egg prices.
The issue, and my point here, is that there are no general answers to these sorts of questions and one can't argue against dairy as a whole by citing the worst practices. The details are going to vary from farm to farm and there are many people that milk their goats and cows on a non-commercial basis.
Doctors really aren't experts in nutrition in the first place, but the vast majority of doctors aren't going to claim that consuming cows milk is, in general, unhealthy. When you have to cite fringe doctors, rather than mainstream science, to support something I think its indicative of a problem.
I'm not sure how because very few in the nutritional science community would claim that dairy is, in general, unhealthy. Though I imagine that your average doctor probably has an inaccurate view of the importance of dairy in one's diet.
I would doubt there is such a commercial dairy farm, but I was discussing dairy in general and not just commercial production. But even if the cows are put to death that doesn't mean the operation lacks compassion, after all, if a food product is concerned uncompassinate because animals die in its production than all food is such as the cultivation of plant crops results in animal deaths as well. So the death of animals, in itself, can't be the basis to avoid one while consuming the other.
You keep saying this "99%", but what is the basis of it?
You are changing gears here, I never suggested that one needs to consume dairy to be healthy and instead was responding to the idea that one needs to avoid dairy to be healthy. But there are some animal based foods that are known to have health benefits, for example omega-3 rich fish.
This is, actually, precisely the point. If you're going to make a general claim about dairy, which you seem to be doing, you need to consider the real world which is composed of particular cases.
You're ignoring a critical issue, namely, in the case of food when you avoid one food item you have to eat another. If food A and food B both result in the same amount of animal deaths in the aggregate, then arguing that food A is preferable to food B doesn't make much sense. So, as I suggested, you can't use the fact that cows die in dairy production to argue that one should instead eat plant alternates....you'd have to show that dairy results in less animal death and/or suffering. If the cattle are being fed grains/soy this is pretty easy to do since we can eat these crops directly and cattle would have to consume more calories in these crops than are produced in their milk. But its much less clear in the case of pastured cows (or goats), in that case they aren't eating cultivated crops and its not clear which results in more animal deaths.
That isn't what I conceded, in fact, I rather explicitly rejected the idea that just because cows may die prematurely that dairy is then uncompassinate.
I found a number of online sites advocating veterinary hospice care, starting with the Nikki Hospice Foundation (which appears to have been the first one), but vets I've asked don't seem to be that familiar with the concept yet, although I live in a well-populated area.It exists.
