LogFAQs > #883654334

Doctor Foxx posted...

Cows need to be pregnant, then give birth and be nursing to produce milk. So dairy cows are artificially inseminated and kept reproducing. With factory farming they take the calf away within a few days (if its even that long) and the calf either goes on to produce milk when it's grown if it's female (though she may be bred to not be a good producer and just slaughtered for meat), and males are sent to be veal, or is sent to a feedlot and later killed. And the cow is inseminated again within 3 months.

This happens over and over and over again.

Not really, after the cow gives birth the first time it's given the hormone that makes it's body think it's still pregnant (which is where people complain about hormones in cows) so it produces milk until it dies.
Raising cattle exclusively for slaughter just isn't price efficient enough, it takes a lot of feed and time to get a cow to slaughter (I believe it's three years), so they just don't do that.