California's Dairy Cows Drink More Water Than...Elephants?
In the drought-stricken, near-desert climate state of California, we have intentionally bred 1.77 million of the animals with the highest daily drinking water requirement per unit pounds of body weight of any other land mammal on Earth – even more than elephants, rhinos, or hippos!
Do you know which land-based mammal has the highest daily drinking water requirement (per unit pound of body weight)? Elephant? Rhinoceros? Hippopotamus? These may be good guesses, but the answer is the modern dairy cow. A milking dairy cow drinks about 30 to 50 gallons of water each day. During periods of heat stress water intake may double. Water weighs 8.35 lbs/gal, so a milking dairy cow may consume as much as 420 (or more) pounds of water daily.
California Milk Advisory Board says California has 1.77 million water-guzzling, alfalfa-inhaling dairy cows. USDA data shows there are about 5.5 million cows total in California.
Yet even though the drinking water alone of just California's dairy cows is 2-3 times more than the amount of water California's human residents drink, this amount of water is dwarfed by the amount used to grow cattle feed. In fact, per Pacific Institute, more of California's water goes to growing feed for cows than anything else! Please comment on how logical you fnd this to be on our Facebook post, or go there to share the info.