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:
I routinely take a suburban or regional bus to and from O'Hare. It's way better than driving/parking and a Lyft from the suburbs automatically costs at least 50$, and I don't really give a damn about easy car access since I don't have one anyway. Incidentally, most American airports where I've ever looked do have decent bus service with or without a rail transit system, you just have to look/ask for it.
The idea in medieval Germany is that when farm yields were low, they were looking to reduce the number of mouths to feed and post-childbearing women were deemed sufficiently 'worthless'. It also could be that during these times they were eating moldy grain they otherwise wouldn't, and the mold may have been ergot, with potent psychedelic/hallucinogenic properties (it's LSD, basically).
At the height of the witch panic, in the years 1450-1750, 0.19 witches were executed per year, per 100k people. The homicide rate in Norway, today, is 0.5 per 100k people, 1.1 in Sweden, 3.0 in Europe overall, and 22.4 in Brazil: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention...
If you're suggesting that medieval witch-hunters may have been acting irrationally, I won't argue. Anyway, this isn't my hypothesis, it travelled around for awhile talking about supposed discoveries of ergot in soil samples. The Salem witch museum has come out against it[0]. A quote:
"When considering the question “What caused the Salem witch trials,” it is important to remember there is a danger in seeking the elusive, singular, all-encompassing explanation."
IMO a big part of it is likely the desire to 'explain'/'rationalize' misfortunes in some way, that suggests a 'solution'.
This theory is appealing to me but in some sense seems contrived to attribute to drugs the evil which already exists in people's hearts. There are plenty of "sober" societies easily capable of such madness and cruellty absent any pharmacological agents.
Ha, it's BI-toof (bi like in bit) and in Kashubian Bëtowò. Their city website has some nice multimedia* BTW, the songs (Bytów w piosence) is particularly great. They commissioned some Pomeranian artists (not the dogs, though that would be even cooler, the region) to record them, many are written especially for this page. Some are even pò kaszëbe. Anyway, it's a really nice place that had an unfortunate occupant. Now try to pronounce Bydgoszcz ;)
So is the Pope, who also does not set policy in the municipality of San Francisco. To reply to your question: the mayor and city council (which is a group of humans, a species which is famously given to disagreement between individual members) of San Francisco have some power to improve the situation, but even they have precious few examples of cities to have attracted and generated tremendous wealth without also having tremendous poverty and depravity, frequently sited literally across the street from said wealth. What US cities have done so humanely?
> but even they have precious few examples of cities to have attracted and generated tremendous wealth without also having tremendous poverty and depravity
Have you considered the possibility that the poverty is a consequence of the wealth?
