Same problem with spider silk. An awesome material but slightly difficult to harvest on an industrial scale.

Can't we engineer the spiders to grow bigger?

Or transplant the milk-gene to, say, tarantulas?

(I'm not a biologist, so no idea if these are good ideas or even make sense)

World: We need a solution to climate change!

HN: Ok, picture this - gigantic, genetically engineered, milkable tarantulas!

I’m actually proud of how far along this sub thread people have kept a straight face!

>> Can't we engineer the spiders to grow bigger?

Well, if we can we should make them really big, like cows, then we can use them as vehicles. Imagine riding a spider up a vertical surface, would be dead cool.

I'd call mine Larry.

That wouldn't work due to the cube-square law. Spiders can't even get enough oxygen at cow sizes due to their book lungs.

You are only making them look more awesome by suggesting attached oxygen tanks.

Pump pure oxygen into the grow-domes.

We were so worried about what we could do, that we didn't consider what we should do.

- Anon, before the tarantula massacre

What’s this desire to treat animals as just expendable biological machines as soon as you figure out they can secrete a substance you like?

What about the consequences affecting the animals themselves from all those fattening antibiotics, being chained up or whatever?

It’s called being a human. We are intelligent apex predators who exploit everything we possibly can.

For the record, we're not the only species who farms other animals. E.g. carpenter ants famously farm aphids (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carpenter_ant).

And of course our skill at exploiting other animals for sustenance is nothing compared to that of parasites.

Honeypot ants farm their own, interesting.

With an emphasis on predators.

They don't matter very much here because unlike cows, spiders probably can't experience suffering.

Let's not engineer bigger spiders, please

likely you would breed them to the point they create milk and then crush and strain the results, repeating in huge batches. Industrialized farming has many traits some would find distasteful if they understood it.

Oh you can milk anything with nipples.

Lol, this made my day :D