Artificial milking benefits worth debating
My wife and I adopted our first child. During this time we got involved in a number of online adoption groups and did a lot of research on the subject.
It turns out there are adoptive mothers who breastfeed their newly adopted babies.
These women were not pregnant and many had never been pregnant, yet they are able to start lactating when they receive their adopted baby.
Lactation is all based on hormones naturally released from the paturity gland. During pregnancy, multiple hormones such as estrogen, progesterone, insulin, growth hormone, cortisol, thyroxine, and human placental lactogen all work together to develop breast tissue and prepare the body for lactation.
Post birth, the release of hormones prolactin and oxytocin control milk production and milk letdown.
Armed with a bit of knowledge, maternal emotions, fenugreek and various pharmacy medicines, nonpregnant woman are lactating.
Dairy cows are good at lactating, so it’s not surprising much of the research on inducing lactation in nonpregnant mammals has been conducted on dairy cows.
Farmers require a cow to give birth in order for her to start producing milk.
The pregnancy causes the cow’s body to produce the hormones required to prepare the cow’s body and udder to produce milk for the calf.
Once the cow calves, she is ready to supply milk to her calf.
When a cow is milked, it tells the cow’s body that it needs to keep producing milk and the various hormone levels within the cow stay at the required levels. The amount of milk the cow produces decreases as the months go by and farmers ‘‘dry off’’ the cow 230 days after calving. The cow has three to four months off before she calves again and the process continues.
Many critics of the dairy industry point to the fact it is reliant on perpetually pregnant cows, which they perceive to mean these cows are cogs in a big factory.
The manner in which cows get in-calf is also controversial, with artificial insemination getting some negative attention.
Then we have the actual calves. They are often a lowvalue by-product not particularly wanted by anyone.
Their treatmentis another controversial aspect. The practice of removing newborn calves from cows doesn’t sit well with many modern consumers and it’s impossible to spin a good story around the bobby calf industry, which slaughters these young unwanted calves.
Another thing to consider is most cows don’t make it to their sixth year. One reason a cow is culled is because she doesn’t get in-calf. This means she won’t produce milk in the next season.
But what if we can get milk from a cow without it being incalf? How does it work?
Essentially, a cow is given hormone injections to replicate what would happen naturally.
The cow then receives fortnightly treatments to maintain hormone levels during lactation. The research shows cows given this treatment produce the same amount of milk, with the same composition and have the same lactation length as cows with a normal calving. What might a system based on induced lactation look like? There would be no unwanted calves, so no bobby calves. For farmers, there would be no busy calving period.
No calves to feed, no calving difficulties. Farmers could theoretically time the treatment so they start milking the whole herd on one particular day.
The lifespan of cows could be much greater too.
But is it ethical?
A farmer can hardly fly the ‘‘natural’’ flag when they are artificially promoting the cow’s lactation. But many people think current industry practices are hardly natural anyway.
For some, the reduction of calves’ suffering and the extension of cows’ lives would outweigh any objections.
Today, highly processed plant-based meat using GMO (genetically modified organism) technology and meat grown in tanks is considered by some to be a more ethical option than conventional meat.
It’s potentially a divisive subject and people will have individual opinions all based on their own priorities. But it is always a good exercise to think about different ideas.
The artificial induction of lactation of cows is not Happy Cow Milk policy.