the censes seems to be that if they are tame enough to eat grass out of my hand we can milk them?
Milk? Do you mean with milking machines or by hand? If you're talking with machines in the milking barn their attitude is irrelevant to CAN or CANNOT :lol: although a semi-docile attitude is the easiest to work around.
If you mean by hand, tame or not tame only relates to how easy they are to work around. Some cows just plain don't like being milked and it doesn't matter if they've been in the milking herd a week or 5 years.
Tame...can mean a lot of different things to different people. I have a nurse cow I can walk up to in the pasture, run my hands over her, strip out each quarter to check for mastitis while she stands placidly, scratch her head, etc. She's not afraid - To me, that's tame.
On the other hand I have several calves that will come up to the fence and cautiously take hay or grain from my hand, but if I cross the fence they won't let me touch them. Just being able to feed them doesn't mean they're tame.
As far as halter breaking, I don't like keeping a halter and/or rope on 24/7. Just don't like the possibilty of it getting caught on something. I'll rope, snub, halter and tie the cow/calf each time I work with them, and let them loose after I'm done. I take a few weeks before I try leading them - the first step is to respect the rope and the post. If they don't respect that you'll have a cow that will take off at any moment for any reason because they know you can't stop them - been there done that. LOL.
Eventually they do get to the point that they'll stop the instant that rope settles over their head, and then to the point you can walk up and halter them. Takes time. I've always felt that 'tame' and 'halterbroke' go hand in hand. You can have tame without halter broke but not truly halter broke without being tame. Make sense?