If cows arent milked they can die so how did they remove the milk before being domesticated?
In: Biology
Calves.
A normal non-farmed cow only starts to make milk when they give birth to a calf and they slowly ramp down production as the calf weans. Farmed cows get milked every day so they continue producing milk, they never “wean”. You can’t just go cold turkey…if you sloooowly ramp down milk production you can get the cow back to normal non-milk producing state.
The short answer is that cows only produce milk when they have calves. On a dairy farm the calves are removed so that the milk can be collected. In the wild, the calf would drink the milk.
Cows don’t have to be milked to survive.
They have to be milked in order to keep the milk production from stopping.
I suspect they survived the same way buffalo or deer survive.
Cows didn’t exist before being domesticated.
Cows were created by domestication.
The wild ancestors hat we created cows from were called Aurochs and the behaved quite differently than modern cattle.
You may look at some breeds of dog and say to yourself that those could not possible survive in the wild without humans, but the truth is they never existed without humans, what humans created them from were wolves and wolves are much better at surviving in the wild than some completely f’ed up dog breeds.
Aurochs have been extinct for few centuries. The last Aurochs died in Poland shortly after what is now New York was founded in America, so the last of their kind died in relatively modern times, but they were already rare then. Serious scientific studies of the animal were never done, and all we know of them today is from looking at cows and dead Aurochs remains and related species and the accounts from people who lived when they were still around.
Based on that it seems quite clear that Aurochs gave milk just like any other wild animal to feed their young and had no need of it being removed by humans. In fact it seems based on accounts any human stupid enough to go near an Aurochs cow when it had a calf nearby and was ready to give milk, would likely not live to regret that stupidity for long.
They are supposed to have been very aggressive and terrible.
Imagine a modern bullfighter being the equivalent of a person fighting a dog, then a person in the past trying to fight an Aurochs would have been like instead of a dog you would fight a wolf.
Those were not docile creatures.
Cattle is an animal species that was made by humans. There were no cows until humans selectively bread other animals to create them. So cows have been specifically designed to live as livestock. But even then it is only quite lately that they have been bread so efficiently that we see variants with serious health problems making them fully dependent on humans for survival.
Cows, like all mammals, only start producing milk when they get close to giving birth. They would then have a calf that would milk them. This ensures their udders stays healthy. As the calf grows up the milk dries out as well until the calf is weened off the milk.
As with most domestic creatures, the domestic cow differs greatly from the wild auroch. This is true of most domestic plants too. We humans kept breeding these plants and animals in ways that have made them more useful for us but that aren’t great if they ever wanted to go it alone again.
As others have said, wild aurochs, like all mammals, only produce enough milk for enough time to support the life of their baby, and then as the baby is weaned, the milk production tapers off and stops until the next birth. But in addition to that, milk cows have been bred for hundreds of years to produce lots and lots of milk, many time more than aurochs would produce for one calf. This means that a cow is in a much worse position than a wild aurochs when nursing. So they need to be milked frequently, and there’s a lot of milk, meaning if they’re not milked they can suffer serious problems, while a wild animal wouldn’t have nearly the problems because they evolved to cope with not nursing.
After you look at all these replies about how the calf is removed, look up “veal production” so you’ll know what happens to a lot of them.
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