Cows and chickens can reproduce on their own. For chickens to reproduce you just need a rooster around. For cows you just need a bull.
The forced insemination is actively deciding which animal is bred with which other animal and when. It is a control thing with more reliability than just having them together in the same field and hoping it worked out. Without humans they would reproduce just fine.
As a species they would likely struggle for a while as they adapted to not being protected from predators and being able to freely roam would result in some roaming places where there wasn’t enough food and water. Out of the millions of cattle there would be plenty of successes and they would live on and adapt.
gigachad@piefed.social 8 hours ago
Most of the animals are bred sick just to maximize production. The answer to your question is self regulation - the amount of animals we are producing is absolutely unnatural. It is not like millions of chickens would populate the world if we wouldn’t exist. They are artificially fabricated in factories.
Why should a cow bred for maximizing milk production should exist and what should they do, jump around in the fields? A normal cow from some decades ago could get older than 20, while they are nowadays bred to produce as much milk as possible and die within 5-6 years.
Rekorse@sh.itjust.works 6 hours ago
They don’t die in 5-6 years, they stop producing milk in high quantities and are slaughtered and used as low quality beef.