I was at a party recently and the vegan thing came up… and no I wasn’t the one who brought it up. When the conversation came around to cheese, various people gave their opinions on why vegans don’t eat dairy. At some point I threw out the notion that male dairy calves were sent off to become veal. With that, a friend called me out stating that thanks to “sexed” artificial insemination the dairy industry (in Canada) no longer produced male calves.
Despite new technologies the dairy industry still produced 290 000 veal calves in Ontario and Quebec in 2019.
Wow I thought. I had never heard that before. Could it be true? Had the dairy industry figured out a way to be “more humane”? The next morning rather than perusing Facebook and the day’s bad news I starting looking into the dairy industry. There is lots of information on the subject available on line. I avoided pro animal rights sites and stuck to dairy industry and government sites in order to make sure I wasn’t falling for the confirmation bias and to get a sense of the situation from the horses mouth as it were.
In a nutshell this is what I found. It pertains only to the Canadian dairy industry:
It is true. The use of artificial insemination and “sexed semen” are on the rise on Canadian dairy farms.
Genetic testing of calves is also on the rise. This is used to decide which calves are going to be the best milk producers upon maturity and are therefore good candidates to receive sexed insemination in the future.
Using sexed semen results in a 90% chance of producing a female calf.
Dairy farmers only use sexed semen on the best cows in their herds. In fact the number of cows being inseminated by beef cattle rather than Holstein semen is on the rise (11%), and these cows are destined for the dinner plate.
In Canada there are approximately 1.4 million dairy cattle (2019). Of those 950 000 are milk producing cows and 450 000 heifers. A heifer is a cow that has yet to produce offspring or milk.
In 2019 in Ontario and Quebec there were 670 000 cows, 300 000 heifers and 290 000 veal calves. Given that 1/4 of female calves don’t become milk producers, (some are sold to other areas and some are put down or die of natural causes) these numbers seem to account for the missing 80 000 calves.
So sadly, while I had hoped that it was true, and that male, veal calves were no longer a dirty by-product of the dairy industry, this doesn’t seem to be the case. While dairy farmers do have new tools that allow them to have some control over the sex of their calves, they are used for selective breeding in an effort to increase profits not as a means to significantly reduce the number of veal calves born.
Sources:
While I looked at many sites, these are the ones that seemed the most reputable and are the ones that I used to quote specifics.
ontarioveal.on.ca
cdn.ca
farmtario.com
canadiancaattlemen.ca
dairyinfo.gc.ca