- This morning, PETA fired off a letter to Center for Advanced Research & Technology (CART) Chief Operating Officer Susan Fisher and the teachers in the marketing and advertising department urging them to allow a PETA representative to visit the school. The group wants to educate students about the suffering of mother cows and their babies in the milk industry as well as the health risks that milk can pose to kids. PETA’s letter follows a promotional contest that the California Milk Processor Board is holding at CART and two other high schools. In this contest, classes act as marketing agencies to come up with the next ad for the board’s “Got Milk?” campaign. The winning class will receive a prize worth $2,000.
PETA points out that newborn male calves are traumatically torn from their mothers and confined to tiny, filthy crates before the calves are slaughtered for veal. PETA also explains that consumption of dairy products has been linked to allergies, ear infections, and juvenile onset diabetes in children as well as to leading killers—such as heart disease and some types of cancer—in adults.
“What’s next?” asks PETA Executive Vice President Tracy Reiman. “Inviting tobacco companies into schools to see who can come up with catchiest ad to get kids hooked on cigarettes? If kids knew what happens to dairy cows, calves, and their own bodies in the name of drinking milk, they’d spew.”
PETA has also written to Amador Valley High School in Pleasanton, Calif., and Orange High School in Orange, Calif. For more information, please visit DumpDairy.com.
PETA’s letter to CART Chief Operating Officer Susan Fisher follows.
October 27, 2008
Susan Fisher, Chief Operating Officer
Center for Advanced Research and Technology
Dear Ms. Fisher,
PETA has recently learned that the Center for Advanced Research and Technology has been chosen to create a new ad for the California Milk Processors Board. Your students are diligently working and functioning as an ad agency to create an ad that encourages their peers to drink milk, but we would like to request equal time so that we can educate them about the suffering that cows endure for dairy production and the health risks associated with drinking milk. Both are serious social issues that deserve an airing.
PETA’s experience is that many kids “have a cow” when shown how the dairy industry treats animals as inanimate “milk machines.” Most kids are kind, and they are usually horrified to learn that male calves born on dairy farms are traumatically taken away from their loving mothers–often winched away by a tractor and a chain around one leg–shortly after birth, and they are confined to crates so small that they cannot even turn around. After 14 weeks, sometimes spent in darkness, they are prodded down the slaughter ramp to be made into veal. Many babies stumble to their deaths because their legs are so swollen and sore from balancing on slippery, waste-covered slatted floors or concrete.
What makes matters worse for students is that drinking cow’s milk puts teens on the road to adult diseases linked to the consumption of meat and dairy, including heart disease, cancer, and strokes. Milk is also the number one source of allergies, and it is linked to ear infections in children, juvenile-onset diabetes, constipation, and obesity. In the last edition of his world-famous book, Baby and Child Care, Dr. Benjamin Spock wrote, “I no longer recommend dairy products. … The essential fats that are needed for brain development are found in vegetable oils. Milk is very low in these essential fats and high in the saturated fats that encourage artery blockage and weight problems as children grow.”
We would like to visit the Center for Advanced Research and Technology to share this information with your students and show them a short video. Obviously, a well-rounded education includes presenting different viewpoints and allowing students to make informed decisions. Please contact me so that we can set a date for our presentation, and contact me if you have any questions. Thank you for your consideration.
Sincerely,
Tracy Reiman
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