Written by Alisa Mullins
Ho, ho, no! Looks like Santa's been indulging in a little too much eggnog:
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How does milk (and other animal products) contribute to impotence? The saturated fat and cholesterol in even so-called low-fat 1 or 2 percent milk (which are actually about 20 and 30 percent fat calories, respectively) clogs the arteries leading to all your organs, not just your heart. Milk is also loaded with female hormones, since cows are kept almost constantly pregnant on today's dairy factory farms. One Harvard University scientist estimates that cow's milk accounts for up to 80 percent of the estrogen in the average person's diet.
So if you want to keep Mrs. Claus happy, better make it soy or almond milk with those cookies on Christmas Eve. Otherwise, Rudolph might be the only one who gets up in the air this holiday season.
Written by Jeff Mackey
Here's some welcome news: Despite the barrage of deceptive dairy industry propaganda, sales of cow's milk—already in free fall—have plummeted in the U.S. It seems that more and more consumers are getting the message that dairy foods are as bad for our health as they are for the well-being of cows.
To make sure the downward trend continues, PETA is re-releasing its series of popular ads parodying the industry's "Got Milk?" campaign. Check them out:
1. On dairy factory farms, male calves are of no use in milk production, so they are often taken away from their mothers when they are as young as 1 day old to be chained up in tiny stalls for weeks—terrified and desperate for their mothers—and fed an inadequate milk substitute to make them miserably anemic in order to produce the pale flesh most desired for veal.
2. Female cows don't fare much better: After having their sensitive horn tissue cut or burned away, most are forced into a vicious cycle of nearly continuous pregnancy, only to have calf after calf taken away so that the milk they produce to nourish their young can be consumed by humans instead. And, of course, once they stop producing enough milk to be profitable, they are sent off to slaughter.
3. Cow's milk is intended for, well, baby cows, not baby humans, so it shouldn't be a surprise that it's not good for our kids, raising their risk for a variety of childhood complaints.
4. Adolescence is hard enough without dealing with blemishes. Take it from Woody Harrelson—to lose the pimples, lose the milk.
5. It's not just kids who have to worry about milk mucking up their health—men have good reason to dump dairy products, too.
6. Ugh. Would you drink a glass of water to which even one drop of pus from a cow's infected udders had been added? No? Then why drink cow's milk?
What You Can Do
Steer clear (no cow pun intended) of cow's milk and other dangerous dairy products. And since all foods from animals result from suffering, the only way to be truly cruelty-free is to go vegan.
PETA Executive Vice President Tracy Reiman, who's also the mother of a child in the California public school system, has written to the administrator of the U.S. Department of Agriculture's (USDA) Food and Nutrition Service asking that the service pull all beef and cow's milk from school lunches after mad cow disease was discovered in an animal at a California rendering plant.
A group of parents who are "DAM MAD" (Dads Against Meat and Mothers Against Dairy) also converged on the Sacramento headquarters of the California Department of Food and Agriculture to urge it to protect children by pulling meat and dairy products from school lunches.
What's truly mad is continuing to feed beef and cow's milk to students, especially because "spent" cows, whose milk supply is exhausted by the dairy industry, are the primary concern when it comes to mad cow disease and are likely to end up as the kind of cheap ground beef that is fed to schoolchildren.
Given that the USDA has expanded its quarantine to a second dairy farm, that it still has not located the infected cow's mother or siblings (who may also have the disease), and that it doesn't even know what the California dairy industry is feeding its cows (because that's considered a "trade secret"), the USDA must stop risking our children's health and remove beef and cow's milk from school cafeterias right away.
Tracy's letter and the demonstration by the DAM MAD parents coincided with another PETA appeal to the USDA urging Secretary Tom Vilsack to correct misleading statements that he made regarding the detection of the disease—also known as bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE)—that created a false and dangerous sense of security by erroneously claiming that the nation's human and animal food supply is safe.
In the letter to Vilsack, PETA points out that there is no way to know how many other animals are infected with mad cow disease because only a tiny fraction—about 0.1 percent of the nearly 34 million cows who are slaughtered every year—are tested for BSE. It's also likely that milk from the cow who tested positive entered the food chain, and contrary to the USDA's assurances about the safety of milk, studies have already shown that another form of the disease can be spread from mother to baby through milk.
Worried that tainted milk or meat may be on your child's lunch tray? Don't wait for the USDA to act. Protect your kids (and yourself) by packing healthy and humane vegan lunches—and keep it up at breakfast, dinner, and snacktime, too!
Written by Heather Faraid Drennan
It never hurts to brush up on answers to questions about animal issues—even seasoned protesters can get a stumper from passersby now and then. See if you know the answers to the following five questions that often pop up in discussions about animal rights:
What's wrong with eggs and dairy products from "free-range" animals? There are no standards for what "free-range" means, so animals on such farms may still spend most of their time in filthy, crowded sheds. Cruel practices such as searing off hens' beaks with a hot blade and relegating male calves to veal crates occur, and when the animals stop producing enough eggs or milk, they are sent to the same slaughterhouses as factory-farmed animals.
If we don't test on animals, what other methods are available? Computer simulations, cell cultures, human cadavers, and clinical trials are just some of the many options researchers can use instead of animal testing to obtain more accurate and cost-effective results.
davedehtre|cc by 2.0
What's wrong with wearing wool? In Australia—where most of the world's merino wool comes from—sheep have been bred to have excessively wrinkled skin in order to produce more wool. The wrinkles collect moisture, which attracts flies, so many farmers resort to "mulesing," a gruesome and cruel procedure in which huge chunks of skin and flesh are cut from lambs' backsides in a crude attempt to prevent flystrike.
Should we put endangered animals in zoos? Endangered animals bred in zoos are rarely released into the wild. Instead, they will spend their lives "warehoused" in cramped enclosures that cannot come close to replicating their natural habitats. As a result, many develop stereotypic behaviors such as pacing, rocking from side to side, and self-mutilation. The only humane and effective way to combat extinction is to protect animals' habitats.
What's wrong with using a choke or prong collar on my dog? As their names imply, choke and prong collars inflict discomfort and pain, and they can severely injure dogs' necks and throats. Far safer and more humane options are no-pull harnesses and halters like the Easy Walk, Halti, or even a standard figure-H harness. For cruelty-free dog-training tips, check out celebrity dog trainer Tamar Geller's video series for PETA.
Have another animal rights question that you've always wondered about? Visit PETA's Frequently Asked Questions page.
Written by PETA
Arrested Development is coming back! Squeals of joy reportedly reverberated through the Twitterverse when the show's creator, Mitch Hurwitz, announced that the series will return for a limited run, followed by a movie. We can't wait to see more of the lovely and compassionate Portia de Rossi and fuzzy funnyman David Cross.
And while we're talking man candy, check out what vegetarian UFC fighter Jon Fitch had to say about milk: “Milk and dairy is poison. It’s poison. There’s nothing good about it for you to put it in your body.” For Blink-182 drummer Travis Barker, it was the plane crash that nearly took his life that made him want to adopt a healthy vegan diet. He told Rolling Stone: "I've been vegan since I got out of the hospital. It's another eye-opener."
The ladies aren't lagging behind in grabbing cruelty-free fare: Scarlett Johansson is into baking vegan breads, cakes, and muffins, and the WNBA's Taj McWilliams-Franklin said that dumping meat has helped her keep her weight down, recover from injuries faster, feel better, and have more energy.
It's Kathy Griffin's rescued dogs who make her feel like a million bucks barks. She told OK! magazine, "They offer unconditional love, and that's all they ask for in return."
Written by Michelle Sherrow
After the Sacramento Superior Court ordered the spin doctors behind the blatantly false "Happy Cows" advertising campaign to hand over to PETA thousands of pages of records they wrongfully claimed were "trade secrets," it became obvious why the agencies wanted to keep the documents under wraps.
The California Department of Food and Agriculture (CDFA) is required to ensure that the California Milk Advisory Board (CMAB) doesn’t make baseless (let alone outlandish) marketing claims. However, even though the CDFA searched thousands of records, it couldn't produce so much as a single page that substantiated the ad claims. The CDFA and the CMAB have conspired for years to mislead consumers into thinking that dairy cows in California are somehow spared the horrors of the abusive dairy factory-farming industry.
The documents also show that PETA’s campaign against the "Happy Cows" deception led to the ads' demise, and the records support our claim that the CMAB's newest propaganda, the "Family Farms" campaign, is just as tall a tale. We are working to have those ads pulled and sent into the deep recesses of the CMAB's archives of lies. The judge also ordered the CDFA to pay PETA's attorneys' fees and costs over the wrongfully withheld documents.
Unless California's milk producers are all auditioning for impostor spots on To Tell the Truth, they need to learn the difference between fact and fiction. You can avoid funding their lies by throwing the support of your dairy dollars behind real cruelty-free milks like rice, soy, and almond milk.
There is a cure for the summertime blues—an oscillating fan, a glass of lemonade, and a chilled bowl of Internet Soup:
As a nutrition and fitness expert for almost 80 years, Jack LaLanne dedicated his life to inspiring people to eat properly and exercise. So it's no wonder that the nonagenarian was still remarkably spry when he passed away on Sunday at the age of 96. For LaLanne, eating properly meant avoiding meat and milk. When questioned about his aversion to milk during an interview on Dateline NBC, the always jovial Jack said, "It's not good for you. It's good for a suckling calf. Are you a suckling calf?"
Among his many credits, the "godfather of fitness" authored many books on health and hosted the longest-running television exercise program in history, The Jack LaLanne Show, for 34 years. LaLanne opened many health clubs and designed much of the equipment used in gyms today. He is also known for his amazing feats of strength, such as swimming from Alcatraz Island to San Francisco while handcuffed (vegan PETA Foundation staffer and endurance swimmer Becky Fenson has made the same trek—swimming the butterfly, no less—but admittedly handcuff-free), towing up to 70 boats long distances while handcuffed and shackled, and doing 1,033 push-ups in 23 minutes. LaLanne set several world records for strength and endurance.
Jack LaLanne's feats brought him fame, but all he really wanted was to show people how to be healthy. If you would like to follow Jack's long-lived example, you can start by picking up PETA's free vegetarian/vegan starter kit.
Two decades of dumping wastewater from Hilmar Cheese Co. onto surrounding fields has polluted the groundwater in Hilmar, California, according to a report by consultants hired by the company. Eighteen wells in and around Hilmar are so contaminated with nitrates, arsenic, barium, and salts that the water is undrinkable, forcing some people to abandon their homes.
One of the world's largest cheesemakers, Hilmar Cheese has a long history of objecting to pollution limits and enforcement actions proposed by the regional water quality control board, and despite thousands of violations over nearly 16 years, it never paid any fines. However, following an exposé by the The Sacramento Bee, the company settled in 2006, paying a $1 million fine and $1.8 million toward environmental studies. Hilmar Cheese is now under a state order to clean up waste discharges by February, but it has also won permission to increase the amount of wastewater that it dumps on fields.
Speaking of dairy-related pollution, a farmer in Berks County, Pennsylvania, had to be rescued after he fell into a 15-foot-deep manure pit earlier this week. I guess you could say he was having a crappy day—kind of like every day for cows on factory dairy farms.
And, this week's 10% Wool "Tag and Release" winner is ... Beth Ann! Congratulations.
Don't forget to check out the archive of past 10% Wool comic strips here. Get more information on the series and the writer here, and learn how to get Jeff's other comic, DeFlocked, into your local paper here.
If you have a general question for PETA and would like a response, please e-mail Info@peta.org. If you need to report cruelty to an animal, please click here. If you are reporting an animal in imminent danger and know where to find the animal and if the abuse is taking place right now, please call your local police department. If the police are unresponsive, please call PETA immediately at 757-622-7382 and press 2.
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