For Immediate Release:
September 26, 2023
Contact:
Sara Groves 202-483-7382
Madison, Wis. – People traveling to the World Dairy Expo next week will likely catch sight of a new messaging blitz from PETA that reminds visitors that a mother cow’s milk is meant for her calf. The appeal—plastered on more than a dozen local buses and placed inside Chicago’s Midway International Airport—urges people to leave cows in peace by going vegan.
“A cow produces milk for her young only after pregnancy, just as a human does for her baby,” says PETA President Ingrid Newkirk. “Instead of celebrating the horrors of the dairy industry, PETA is calling on everyone to skip the World Dairy Expo and to show compassion to mothers and their babies by choosing only vegan milks, yogurts, and cheeses.”
In the dairy industry, calves are torn away from their mothers within a day of birth so the milk meant to nourish them can be stolen and sold in supermarkets. It’s standard industry practice to keep cows almost constantly pregnant by forcibly inseminating them—workers insert an arm into the animals’ rectum and a metal rod to deliver semen into their vagina—and although people rarely think about it, there’s no retirement home for cows: After only a few years, their bodies wear out and they’re sent to slaughter.
PETA’s ads are located on 14 Metro Transit buses in Madison and in Concourse B (Arrivals & Departures) at Midway.
PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to eat or abuse in any other way”—opposes speciesism, a human-supremacist worldview, and offers a free vegan starter kit on its website. For more information, please visit PETA.org, listen to The PETA Podcast, or follow the group on X (formerly Twitter), Facebook, or Instagram.
