It's the poor overworked abused Poopoomba robot with the worst job in the world whose happiness I worry about, though. They could do a lot of damage if they revolted. Maybe they could let them out to drive around in the fields vacuuming up cow plops at their own pace, free-range style.
So cow's quality of life increase the quality and the quantity of milk. Moreover most farmers I know would rather have happy animals, their living depends on them !
Believe it or not, most people who go into animal husbandry do so because they enjoy working with animals and care deeply about their welfare.
There is no such "thing" as "a dairy" that would or wouldn't care about something. It's all people making decisions and why wouldn't we strive to reduce suffering of other animals?!
Vegans also argue that the entire dairy industry, which necessarily requires keeping cows continually pregnant and separating them from their calves soon after birth, in itself creates immense suffering.
And as long as you still have a bottom line while reducing animal suffering, many farmers may be perfectly happy with that tradeoff.
They may see it as a win/win — they get to still run a business doing what they love, while caring for the animals they love.
And if they ultimately are more successful, maybe they reduce and/or “convert” the number of farmers that care less for their animals’ wellbeing.
cows only moo when they are unhappy. I've been in barns with over 1000 cows and they are nearly silent. Cows in the wide open pasture moo all the time because of things they don't like.
Couple of years ago, I filmed for dairy tech companies and found it fascinating seeing how robot milkers, collars and so on all worked together.
Honestly a dairy I visited only had stalls for milking time. Their issue was that the cows wouldnt eat the shit they fed them. But they had a lot of room to run around in while being malnourished.
They went bankrupt a few years later, mainly because malnourished cows dont tend to provide milk.
Minimum standards remain useful to weed out scammers and whatnot who still try go against the grain after the market has shifted, but the general consensus has to be on board first, and when that is the case most farmers will have no choice but to comply. Agricultural markets are, as you say, mostly efficient. Far more efficient than most realize.
Of course, the world isn't limited to democracies, so perhaps you are imagining China or something?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cow_(2021_film)
There’s a scene where cows finally run out of the barn at the beginning of spring. Their joy is obvious.
Representative democracy simply introduces a messenger, allowing democracy to happen locally even where the people are spread over large areas. The people at the local level carry out democracy locally and the product of that is compiled with the products from other locales by the messengers. The action of the messenger is recorded to ensure that the will didn't change in transit. It doesn't introduce a dictator to invent laws for you like you seem to suggest. It is still by the action of the people.
I mean, it can introduce a dictator if the people forget to participate in democracy. Someone will rise up and take charge if everyone else completely ignores what is going on. That might be what you are imagining. But you don't really have a democracy (representative or direct) if the people are not active participants. A democracy in name only isn't actually a democracy.
While an assumption of a democracy was made for the sake of discussion, it was recognized that the world is bigger than democracy.
Animal products for better or worse are used everywhere, and by arguing against their use you can be accused of prioritising the welfare of horses over children if you support vaccines. My house was built on forest land that likely displaced animals when it was cleared too, and caused their suffering.
Or, I could say that my presence on the planet has an impact at every level, and I will do my best to try and be conscious of that impact.
Cows don't run out of the barn in any case I've ever seen - they walk. The young calfs run out, but not the older cows. (and maybe some of the young cows). If you typical cow is running it is because she is scared.
https://extension.umn.edu/dairy-handling-and-best-practices/...
And the way the root comment began: "why would a dairy care about the cow's quality of life?" seemed cynical and inflammatory; I'd hope HN readers would be mature enough to already understand that dairy cows’ quality of life matters both for ethical and economic reasons.
Anyway, I’ve left the subthread detached and downweighted but un-collapsed it. That way it's easy to find for people interested in that aspect of the topic, but doesn’t dominate the top of the thread.
1. Your link actually shows that 74% (now 73% as of the latest data) of Canadian diary barns (without robots) are tie-stall. That does not necessarily imply that the cows are kept in tie-stalls. When we still had cows in a tie-stall barn they were only tied during milking.
2. Nobody is realistically building new tie-stall barns. Especially in Canada where the law now makes that impractical (not completely impossible, but for all intents and purposes). Those that still exist are overwhelmingly old and therefore small. Despite tie-stall barns being most prevalent by a tidy margin, the same dataset again indicates that only 35% of the cows are in tie-stall barns. How many of them are kept in tie-stalls is, unfortunately, not enumerated in the data.
My seedbox is hosting it if you want to download it. It's not the most available file on the web: https://filebin.net/htjmlghpit9nzq84