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Re:Bison return to Illinois' Kane County after 200 years by soperj on Sunday January 04, 2026 @02:05PM (#46491073)
Wild cows won't really happen, aside from them being easy prey, milk cows can't even feed their young because they produce so much milk that they drown them. They have to feed the babies with a bottle.
Re:Bison return to Illinois' Kane County after 200 years by Mistletoe on Sunday January 04, 2026 @05:10PM (#46492825)
Do you have a reference for that? Some googling says it is a myth, which sounds right.
Re:Bison return to Illinois' Kane County after 200 years by soperj on Monday January 05, 2026 @06:42PM (#46506800)
Been to a dairy farm.
Re:Bison return to Illinois' Kane County after 200 years by Mistletoe on Monday January 05, 2026 @11:52PM (#46508877)
Idk my Dad worked on a dairy farm part time when I was a kid and I've never heard of that. That's just not how teats and udders work. There is nothing here about how the cow makes too much milk and will drown the calf.

https://www.fwi.co.uk/livestock/youngstock-management/pros-c...

Re:Bison return to Illinois' Kane County after 200 years by soperj on Tuesday January 06, 2026 @11:54AM (#46514825)
This is what the dairy farmer told me when I asked why they bottle feed.
Re:Bison return to Illinois' Kane County after 200 years by mickdeek86 on Tuesday January 06, 2026 @10:50PM (#46522326)
He may have been pulling your leg. We bottle feed the calves formula, because to allow the calves to drink the milk would defeat the purpose of raising dairy cows. Also teat cleanliness and health is huge; suckling causes problems. Incidentally, wild cows actually are a thing in a bunch of far-flung places. I saw them in the Aleutian islands (some genius brought them up there thinking he could get a beef business going and just left them when it of course failed) and they're mean as hell. There's a bunch of feral cattle on the Big Island of Hawaii as well, and TIL there are ~5 million stray cows in India where it illegal to kill them for religious reasons, which creates a massive problem for transport infrastructure, and gave rise to possibly my all-time favorite wikipedia article title:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cow_vigilante_violence_in_Indi...