PETA loses credibility as it loses touch with reality

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) has published this letter on its Media Centre webpage.

September 23, 2008

Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield, Cofounders
Ben & Jerry's Homemade Inc.

Dear Mr. Cohen and Mr. Greenfield,

On behalf of PETA and our more than 2 million members and supporters, I'd like to bring your attention to an innovative new idea from Switzerland that would bring a unique twist to Ben and Jerry's. Storchen restaurant is set to unveil a menu that includes soups, stews, and sauces made with at least 75 percent breast milk procured from human donors who are paid in exchange for their milk. If Ben and Jerry's replaced the cow's milk in its ice cream with breast milk, your customers--and cows--would reap the benefits.

Using cow's milk for your ice cream is a hazard to your customer's health. Dairy products have been linked to juvenile diabetes, allergies, constipation, obesity, and prostate and ovarian cancer. The late Dr. Benjamin Spock, America's leading authority on child care, spoke out against feeding cow's milk to children, saying it may play a role in anemia, allergies, and juvenile diabetes and in the long term, will set kids up for obesity and heart disease--America's number one cause of death.

Animals will also benefit from the switch to breast milk. Like all mammals, cows only produce milk during and after pregnancy, so to be able to constantly milk them, cows are forcefully impregnated every nine months. After several years of living in filthy conditions and being forced to produce 10 times more milk than they would naturally, their exhausted bodies are turned into hamburgers or ground up for soup.

And of course, the veal industry could not survive without the dairy industry. Because male calves can't produce milk, dairy farmers take them from their mothers immediately after birth and sell them to veal farms, where they endure 14 to17 weeks of torment chained inside a crate so small that they can't even turn around.

The breast is best! Won't you give cows and their babies a break and our health a boost by switching from cow's milk to breast milk in Ben and Jerry's ice cream? Thank you for your consideration.

Sincerely,

Tracy Reiman
Executive Vice President

The response from Ben and Jerry and others came via the media:

While co-founders Mr Cohen and Mr Greenfield are famously environmentally and ethically aware – they established a "Climate Change College" which encourages grass-roots action on climate change, and go by the slogan "Milking happy Cows, Not the Planet" – they baulked at the suggestion. "We applaud [the group's] novel approach to bringing attention to an issue, but we believe a mother's milk is best used for her child," said a Ben & Jerry's spokesperson.
And then there is, as Mr Locher found, the problem of supply. As 50 per cent of each 500ml tub of ice cream is made from milk and cream, finding enough human milk to sustain production of Ben & Jerry's would be a challenge.
The suggestion that cows' milk has a detrimental effect on health provoked anger this weekend among dairy farmers, who have been hit by falling prices and the increasing popularity of non-dairy alternatives such as soy milk.
"Dairy foods have been in the diet for thousands of years," said Dr Judith Bryans, director of the Dairy Council. "The reality of chronic diseases is that they are an interaction between genes, the environment and the diet, and these negative stories about dairy are a misrepresentation of science."

It is truly sad to see an animal rights lobby group disintegrating to the point of suggesting the bizarre proposition that women should become commercial cows.