 In the more recent past, people in agricultural societies owned dairy animals that they milked for domestic and local (village) consumption, a typical example of a cottage industry.The animals might serve multiple purposes (for example, as a draught animal for pulling a plow as a youngster, and at the end of its useful life as meat).In this case, the animals were normally milked by hand and the herd size was quite small, so that all of the animals could be milked in less than an hour—about 10 per milker.