Posted on 09/24/2008 1:59:19 PM PDT by LibWhacker
VERMONT -- People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals sent a letter to Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield, cofounders of Ben & Jerry's Homemade Inc., urging them to replace cow's milk they use in their ice cream products with human breast milk, according to a statement recently released by a PETA spokeswoman.
"PETA's request comes in the wake of news reports that a Swiss restaurant owner will begin purchasing breast milk from nursing mothers and substituting breast milk for 75 percent of the cow's milk in the food he serves," the statement says.
PETA officials say a move to human breast milk would lessen the suffering of dairy cows and their babies on factory farms and benefit human health.
"The fact that human adults consume huge quantities of dairy products made from milk that was meant for a baby cow just doesn't make sense," says PETA Executive Vice President Tracy Reiman. "Everyone knows that 'the breast is best,' so Ben & Jerry's could do consumers and cows a big favor by making the switch to breast milk."
In a statement Ben and Jerry's said, "We applaud PETA's novel approach to bringing attention to an issue, but we believe a mother's milk is best used for her child."
Read PETA's letter to Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield
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 to 17 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
A little story: When I was a kid on my uncle’s farm, we used to milk the cows everyday, twice a day, without fail, at 5:30am and 5:30pm. Uncle was very strict about it.
One day we were harvesting wheat about 50 miles west of the farm on one of his leased plots of land and our truck broke down. We weren’t able to get back to the farm until about 2am. We immediately sped out into the pasture and walked the cows two miles back to the barn in the blackness with the truck following.
The cows’ sacks were huge by this time, almost bursting, and with every step they took, milk was squirting out of their teats. They were moaning in agony and trying to butt us. When we finally got them back into the barn, they tried to kick us when we put them in their stalls and shackled them. They were PO’d at us, no two ways about it. They were in pain and wanted to be milked, but they also wanted to make us pay.
You can ruin a milk cow by not milking it on time (what PETA wants), especially if you make a habit of it. We didn’t make a habit of it. That was the only time we missed a milking in all the summers I spent on the farm.
Sounds like he hasn’t met the right woman.
ping!
... two scoops of wild cherry in a cone please. No, make that two cones.
Liberalism truly IS a mental disorder, as Mike Savage says.
I belong to PETH—People for the Ethical Treatment of Humans. We are against Islam, against communism, against liberals who refuse to recognize that all life must kill & consume other life in order to survive (and that humans have the right to eat all other life forms, because our survival is a basic right), and against Susan Sarandon on general principles.
If any animal happens to successfully kill & eat a human being, fine; that’s survival for that animal. But as a member of the reigning species, I say all other animals are fair game for us humans.
Liberals should be enslaved and forced to act as human shields for our troops on patrol in Baghdad and wherever else IED’s are common. Just kidding, they are fun to have around sometimes, even if they are permitted to roam free.
I’m partial to vanilla but I’ll try the chocolate too...
Gees, lady, why are you yelling at me?
PETA lamebrains need to eat more meat. Their brains are mal-nourished.
If a cow isn’t relieved by being milked, it goes through a lot of pain.
I love animals too, but please let anyone you know that supports these deviants that their money would be better donated to their local shelters, or the ASPCA. Destroy PETA now!!!!!!!!!
No way of knowing with the data base malfunction. You should be safe from the posting police for a while as long as nobody posted it after yesterday morning.
So much material, so little time....
No.
I’m surprised PETA doesn’t just recommend we switch to soy milk, so men will start growing their own breasts. ;)
That's true of any mammal. Having nursed my kids, I definitely can concur.
All the dairy farms I see look pretty good to me. The calves are on the farms with the cows, kept outside and allowed to range. The barns are open and airy. Yeah they smell, but WTH, they're cows!
A sick animal doesn't produce well and medicine is expensive. It's not worth their while for dairy farmers to mistreat their animals.
They want milk, not silicone.
They want milk, not silicone.
nor Hepatitis C
lol. You mentioned the Code Pinko. I worked at a concert last night that Code Pink had a table at. (I go to concerts to escape politics, not be campaigned to. But this one even had an Vote for Obama thing). I found many of these people are actually nice when they don’t know your POV. Two people wore “Capitalism is the devil’s wet dream” shirts. I almost asked how they got their tickets, but am not supposed to start fights at work. LOL!
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