I'm, ummm, speechless

[SeaCat]

You just can't make this shit up.


PETA Urges Ben & Jerry's To Use Human Milk

POSTED: 2:21 pm EDT September 23, 2008
UPDATED: 6:10 pm EDT September 23, 2008


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."

Ben and Jerry's released a statement, "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


Cat

 

[voluptuary_manque]

Isn't it amazing what some organizations will do for publicity and increased donations?

 

[JagFarlane]

Isn't it amazing what some organizations will do for publicity and increased donations?

Isn't it amazing they are actually serious?
To be honest, things like this have been going on for years from groups like GreenPeace, PETA, and ELF.

Green Peace most famously had the ship dubbed The Rainbow Warrior and just loved use it to run in the middle of naval wargames, putting sailors lives at severe risk, not to mention ruining several promising careers.

PETA has been saying things like this for years. They also like to do severe acts, like flying hang gliders painted like geese in the middle of flocks during goose hunting season. They have been known to harass hunters, picket power plants, and generally cause issue wherever they can.

ELF is, from my understanding, a more recently uncovered group. They were founded in Britain in '92, spreading to the rest of Europe in '94. As of 2001, they were classified as a top terror threat by the FBI. They, like ALF, are an ecoterrorist group that believe in taking the profit out of enviromental destruction by...blowing companies up.

 

[Safe_Bet]

Too cool! This means I can have my own flavor named after me!

 

[DesertPirate]

This is one flakey bunch of nuts!


I really ought to sue this group for stealing the initials of the real PETA:
People Eating Tasty Animals!

 

[off2bed]

I posted a news story here the other day about a restaurant in Switzerland that's cooking with human breast milk.

 

[jomar]

Human breast milk in food products: Plot bunny for unintended consequences here. Get 'em while they're hot.

 

[TE999]

I volunteer to be a milkman.

 

[voluptuary_manque]

I was planning on putting it into the novel before this thread started, anyway.

 

[Rumple Foreskin]

"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.

So, let me get this straight, are they contending that human adults consuming milk meant for a baby human does makes more sense?

To quote my uncle, "Some people are proud of being stupid."

Rumple Foreskin

 

[SweetPrettyAss]

This is one of the dumbest Ideas I have ever read. As Ben and Jerry and Rumple Foreskin implied, I would rather deprive calves of the milk of their mothers than to deprive human babies. I have never been pregnant so I am unsure but doesn't a nursing mother produce milk for as long as she is nursing? If so, wouldn't cows do the same thing and can an udder tell the difference between a calf and a milking machine?

What about bottled milk? I drink it sometimes and put it on my cereal or use it to make pancakes. I bet a lot more milk is used like that than in ice cream. I can just imagine a herd of women being brought in from pasture for the evening milking.

I wonder if they realize that many of the dairy cows that now provide milk for humans would be cut into steaks and hamburgers if they were no longer being milked. It wouldn't save the lives or alleviate the suffering of any breeder cows either. It would make it worse. After their babies were taken away, for whatever reason, they would remain painfully unmilked.

 

[DesertPirate]

They are among us and they vote!

 

[Bizkit_Writer]

This is one of the dumbest Ideas I have ever read. As Ben and Jerry and Rumple Foreskin implied, I would rather deprive calves of the milk of their mothers than to deprive human babies. I have never been pregnant so I am unsure but doesn't a nursing mother produce milk for as long as she is nursing? If so, wouldn't cows do the same thing and can an udder tell the difference between a calf and a milking machine?

What about bottled milk? I drink it sometimes and put it on my cereal or use it to make pancakes. I bet a lot more milk is used like that than in ice cream. I can just imagine a herd of women being brought in from pasture for the evening milking.

I agree this is dumb! Hello we've been taking milk from cows for YEARS! Centuries even! Oy vei!

 

[champagne1982]

The writer of the letter should get their dairy facts straight. A cow will continue to lactate until they are no longer milked regularly. One birth is all it takes to bring on the lactation cycle so the gestational idea is wrong.

 

[TE999]

This is one of the dumbest Ideas I have ever read. As Ben and Jerry and Rumple Foreskin implied, I would rather deprive calves of the milk of their mothers than to deprive human babies. I have never been pregnant so I am unsure but doesn't a nursing mother produce milk for as long as she is nursing? If so, wouldn't cows do the same thing and can an udder tell the difference between a calf and a milking machine?

What about bottled milk? I drink it sometimes and put it on my cereal or use it to make pancakes. I bet a lot more milk is used like that than in ice cream. I can just imagine a herd of women being brought in from pasture for the evening milking.

I wonder if they realize that many of the dairy cows that now provide milk for humans would be cut into steaks and hamburgers if they were no longer being milked. It wouldn't save the lives of any breeder cows either. After their babies were taken away, for whatever reason, they would be painfully unmilked.

Don't try to apply any degree of rationality to this bunch of bird and bunny nuts, SPA.

To them, the cow is more important than the baby. I'm not kidding.

 

[AvoidingRealWork]

Too cool! This means I can have my own flavor named after me!

I like Safe_Bet's avatar.

 

[Katyusha]

The writer of the letter should get their dairy facts straight. A cow will continue to lactate until they are no longer milked regularly. One birth is all it takes to bring on the lactation cycle so the gestational idea is wrong.

There's a difference between the true animal- and environmental-rights lobbies and groups like PETA, the Earth and Animal Liberation Fronts, Greenpeace, etc. The latter groups rarely know their facts and delude themselves into thinking they're doing good by spreading misinformation and scaring people. It's what they do.

And they piss me off, especially whatever fringe group it is that keeps trying to get court injunctions against the big prescribed burns and forest-thinning operations out west. Go to hell, all of you.

 

[voluptuary_manque]

There's a difference between the true animal- and environmental-rights lobbies and groups like PETA, the Earth and Animal Liberation Fronts, Greenpeace, etc. The latter groups rarely know their facts and delude themselves into thinking they're doing good by spreading misinformation and scaring people. It's what they do.

And they piss me off, especially whatever fringe group it is that keeps trying to get court injunctions against the big prescribed burns and forest-thinning operations out west. Go to hell, all of you.

The lunatic fringe consists of vegan evangelists who haven't got the word that plants are actually alive. Once it sinks in, they will be in a terrible dilemma. May be fun to watch . . .

Did you hear that they offered a million to any microbiologist who can come up with a palatable meat substitute from yeast?

 

[nicole_quinn26]

I'm in awe right now, I hope this is seriously a joke. See this is one of my problems with PETA, I mean obviously to abuse an animal is messed up. I think anyone that outright starves, neglects and does terrible things to animals should be taken down. But... please breast milk? Just stop you're giving animal rights a bad name. Someone already mentioned to obvious here about mothers only having milk when THEY'RE pregnant and after birth... so let's leave the animals be and harm ourselves. I don't see anyone of them stepping up. Also I find the level of hypocrisy of some vegetarians amazing, one girl I knew was obsessed with being a vegetarian but she was Pro-Choice... does anyone else see something wrong with that? It's okay to kill fetuses so long as we're saving cows from being hamburger! GOOD CALL!

OH and not all farms are like PETA lady say, I know plenty of baby cows that stay with their mothers and don't get shipped off (and by golly we get the moms milk too!). I live in a farming area and this is soo not the case. They need to STOP lumping a few crappy large corporations in with local farmers that treat their animals with respect. GAH now I'm just getting frustrated... *steps away*

 

[SweetPrettyAss]

The lunatic fringe consists of vegan evangelists who haven't got the word that plants are actually alive. Once it sinks in, they will be in a terrible dilemma. May be fun to watch . . .

Did you hear that they offered a million to any microbiologist who can come up with a palatable meat substitute from yeast?

I have also heard that some vegans think that even nursing a baby is WRONG. Maybe that's just the lunatic fringe of the lunatic fringe.

 

[voluptuary_manque]

I have also heard that some vegans think that even nursing a baby is WRONG. Maybe that's just the lunatic fringe of the lunatic fringe.

Look at it this way. From an evolutionary standpoint, anyone who thinks like that is a strain on the way to extinction. Be grateful.

 

[Equinoxe]

Isn't it amazing they are actually serious?

Actually, I'm pretty certain they're not being serious here. Rather, they are ironically advocating using human milk in dairy foods, so that people will react in a horrified and digusted manner at how that would treat human beings, with the hope that people will conclude that it is a horrible thing to do to cows.

 

[voluptuary_manque]

Actually, I'm pretty certain they're not being serious here. Rather, they are ironically advocating using human milk in dairy foods, so that people will react in a horrified and digusted manner at how that would treat human beings, with the hope that people will conclude that it is a horrible thing to do to cows.

I disagree. This is the lot who tried to start an advertising campaign on college campuses advocating beer instead of milk. As if underage drinking wasn't a big enough problem already. They have no concept of people.

 

[Equinoxe]

I disagree. This is the lot who tried to start an advertising campaign on college campuses advocating beer instead of milk. As if underage drinking wasn't a big enough problem already. They have no concept of people.

PETA regards people and other animals as the same. Which is exactly the point they are trying to make with this publicity stunt and, for that matter, with all of their publicity stunts. With regard to the drink beer instead of milk campaign, again, they were ironically advocating that, foolishly hoping that people would equate the two (binge drinking and drinking milk) as equally wrong. It's a publicity stunt intended to provoke people, not a sincere desire to see that happen.

 

[Xina]

The writer of the letter should get their dairy facts straight. A cow will continue to lactate until they are no longer milked regularly. One birth is all it takes to bring on the lactation cycle so the gestational idea is wrong.

You're quite right, I'm glad someone else caught this. This is true of any mammal and I'm sure any mother knows this, so how so many people in PETA can claim their information as fact is beyond me.

I went vegetarian about a year and a half ago and I went to the PETA website and read some things. I found it to be unbelievably inaccurate and insane. Their facts are unbelievably wrong and I don't know if they're just that ignorant or doing it on purpose to scare people into doing what they want. I've been receiving emails from them ever since I went veggie and they get stupider and stupider all the time.

I've recently started eating meat again. Something bad happened and while I was in the ER they brought me a turkey sandwhich. I realize I could have requested something vegetarian but for the first time in a year and a half I realized that my life was much more important than that of the turkey and I wanted it so I ate it.

It's sick how the people at PETA think that the animal lives are more important than the people. Milking cows may be an exploitation of the animal but how can they possibly see exploitation of human females as the BETTER alternative??

I don't know if they did this simply to draw attention to the issue or if they seriously thought that ben and jerry's would do this considering that they are already the most veggie friendly, animal friendly, and hippiest of ice creams.