Europe consumes a lot of milk, which requires many calves to be born. But nobody wants them. They are badly treated, or simply killed. The organic sec

Too many calves are born. We dispose of them like garbage

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2025-01-20 09:30:05

Europe consumes a lot of milk, which requires many calves to be born. But nobody wants them. They are badly treated, or simply killed. The organic sector, meanwhile, is resisting an easy technological fix.

Your last cheese sandwich was only a few hours ago, perhaps made with a nutty slice of Appenzeller. However, you likely have no memory of your most recent veal schnitzel. Most people's diets are probably like this: They eat dairy products several times a day while they rarely, if ever, eat veal. These unequal preferences are at the root of an ethical problem.

That's because for a cow to give milk, it must calve. According to a tried and tested farmer's rule, it must give birth to a calf approximately every 450 days in order to achieve a peak yield of up to 60 liters of milk per day. Every year, millions of high-performance dairy cows give birth to just as many calves. But humans don't need this gigantic herd of young animals. Not for eating. Not for rearing, which consumes expensive milk that can also be sold to humans.

The cute calf with the delicate fluff is therefore undesirable in most cases. It ends up in a dramatically large herd of «surplus calves.» This is what experts call the young animals that are hardly worth anything. They are not even carefully weaned from their mother, as would be species-appropriate. According to a study carried out for the European Commission by Wageningen University, there are 20 million of these surplus calves born every year in the EU alone.