Protecting Cows is relevant and beneficial for the whole country

In this section I want to analyse what relevance protecting cows would have on the country if the entire national herd was cared for in the way described on this web site. It was interesting to see that indeed protecting cows does have a real social value for the whole country and has elements that would even cater for a non-vegetarian diet.

Assessing who would benefit from a country where all the cows are protected

1. The cows would benefit.
   1. The cows don’t want to be killed but want to live out their lives. If they are not killed they will be happy.
   2. As their calves are not being taken away then they cows are happy because they can suckle their own calves directly.
   3. Calves drinking directly from the udders is healthier than using a milking machine and so the cows will be better as there will be less udder problems
   4. Cows enjoy being hand milked and enjoy the human interaction and thus they are happier with this system
2. The calves would benefit
   1. Calves want to suckle from their mothers and when they do they develop with more strength, contentment and happiness
   2. Calves don’t want to die and if they are not taken away they will be happier.
3. Society would benefit
   1. People hand milking and working with the cows get the beneficial effect of being close and hands on with cows
   2. Employing 400,000 people and reducing the unemployment by 30% means the general state of society is better because people are happier working than not working.
   3. The government is already paying people for not working and so it should be a better society if more people are working and helping with the economy.
   4. The wives/companions of the employed milkers are happier because their other half is working rather than at home.
   5. Most people troubled by how the modern dairies run will be happy that there is a way of producing milk that does not involve harming the cows
   6. Those who eat meat will be happy because there is still meat for them

This is just a brief list and I welcome any additional ways that you can see would be a benefit to society in one way or another.

These are the numbers and principles I use for the analysis: (many of these figures are based on records over a 20 year period when I was managing Bhaktivdanta Manor New Gokula Farm)

• Average age a cow lives 16.25 years. (this takes into account calf mortality)
• Cows hand milked
• Milk person can milk 10 cows twice a day
• Calf gets 25% of the milk directly from its mother until it is 5/6 months old then weaned
• Milk is for people as well as the calf (until weaned)
• Cows will die naturally
• Each cow will give 10,000 litres per lactation
• Each lactation is based on an average of 4.15 years
• UK National Herd 2016 is 9.9 million cattle
• UK Population in 2016 is 65.6 million

OK here we go.

Firstly lets calculate how many cows we will be impregnating each year and their subsequent lactations. To find this I have divided the total national herd by the average life of a cow. This will give the number of calves each year that will eventually stabilize at the national herd number.

9,900,000 divided by 16.25      =       609,231 calves each year

Now we want to assess how much milk per year we can expect. For that we will multiply the amount of cows producing milk by the average milk yield per lactation

609,231 multiplied by 10,000   =   6,092,310,000 litres

Now we will see what that means for each person in the UK Population

6,092,310,000 litres divided by 65,600,000 population    =   92.8 litres per person

How much per day per person

92.8 litres divided by 365 days   =   0.25 litres per day per person

In wikipedia it tells us that in 2007 the average milk consumption per capita of UK is 241.47kg which equates to 0.64 litres (0.66kg) per day. This is 2.5 times more than the estimate I have shown by production of cow protection milk.

To see the total number of cows milking we multiply the number of calves each year by 4.25

609,231 calves multiplied by 4.25 average lactation length = 2,589,232 cows milking

Now we will see how many people will be employed by hand milking. The cows will need milking 365 days a year and so we must also take into account holiday and sick cover. When you calculate how many paid days per year you need to cover each day milking plus pay for holiday time plus sickness you have to consider a working year is 405 days. I can show you the calculations if you require. To see how much time a person actually works you can calculate 5 days a week x 52, minus 28 days holiday. This gives you 232 actual working days. For each milking session per person you would divide 405 days by 232 = 1.7. That means for each number of cows milking you would need to multiply the figure by 1.7 to get the number of milkers. Here goes:

2,589,232 (Milking cows) divided by 10 (number of cows per milker) x 1.7 (to cover rest of week and holidays etc) = 440,169 milkers.

This figure of 440,169 milkers would significantly reduce the amount of unemployment in the country by 30%. The official unemployment rate from the office of national statistics UK shows that there are 1,455,000 unemployed people up to Jul 2017.

In case you are wondering if there is any meat for those who have the inclination then yes. The cows are going to die anyway, you just have to wait for the natural time for it to happen. OK there are some current legal hurdles that would need adjusting but suppose they were cleared then we would could estimate the following. From a simple internet search you can see that you would get about 416kg of meat for each animal weighing 1000kg. If we consider that the average weight of an adult cow  is 720kg and an adult bull/ox is 1100kg then an average would be 910 kg. From this we can estimate the average amount of meat per cow which is 378 kg.

609,231 (amount of cows that would die on average each year) multiplied by 378kg (average amount of meat per animal) divide by 1000 for tonnes = 230,289 tonnes