Comment by alpineman
3 hours ago
Cows also grieve their young yet we keep them permanently (forcibly) impregnated and take their young away to be slaughtered every few months just so we can drink their breast milk in our coffee. I can’t take seriously people who get emotional over stories like this then eat dairy products.
Ordinarily in Minecraft if you click a cow with a bucket it fills with milk, a simplistic model of how this works that reflects probably the level of thought most people have about where cow milk comes from.
One of the mods (Animalia maybe?) obliges you to do this properly. Find a male and a female, enclose them and make sure they're well fed so that they'll breed, wait a while for the female to give birth, steal the calf, and then you can collect her milk. I would bet far more players in games with that mod go vegan because it was a lot of hassle to make these arrangements compared to making soy milk.
I once heard someone claim that we've somehow completely "bred away" any maternal instincts from dairy cows. So it's perfectly okay to forcibly separate them from their calves.
It's crazy to hear the various bizzare ways people use to try to justify and cope with their habits.
Try considering this with some nuance. Many people likely do not know that cows grieve or their bubble of habits and upbringing prevents this fact from reaching them. A story that brings empathy towards any animal is a step towards less suffering for all animals.
[dead]