Full-Page Call for Dairy Whistleblowers Hits Local Papers, Courtesy of PETA

For Immediate Release:
November 16, 2021

Contact:
Brooke Rossi 202-483-7382

“Have you witnessed animal abuse or neglect on a dairy farm?” That’s the question from PETA that’s running in tomorrow’s editions of The Fresno Bee and its Spanish counterpart, Vida en el Valle, asking tipsters to submit their evidence to [email protected]. PETA investigations have found abuse on dairy farms across the country, including cows denied care for oozing grapefruit-size masses in Pennsylvania and others forced to lie down in their own waste in Texas—and the group is eager to find out what’s hiding behind closed doors in California.

“We want to hear from anyone who has seen cows struggling to walk, mired in their own waste, or bellowing for the calves who have been taken from them,” says PETA Executive Vice President Tracy Reiman. “By reporting abuse to PETA, industry insiders can help stop the abuse that Big Ag is desperate to hide.”

California Dairy Magazine stopped responding to PETA’s ad inquiries after seeing its artwork, so the group placed its whistleblower-seeking messages in local newspapers instead. PETA also plans to run them in newspapers in other dairy-heavy areas, including in Iowa, Michigan, and Pennsylvania.

Cows in the dairy industry are forcibly artificially inseminated—workers insert an arm into the animals’ rectum and a metal rod to deliver semen into their vagina—and their calves are taken away from them shortly after birth so that their milk can be sold and consumed by humans instead. Male calves, who are considered a “byproduct” by the dairy industry, may be killed and carved up for veal, while female calves are typically used as milk machines until their bodies give out and they’re slaughtered for cheap meat.

For all these reasons and more, per capita fluid cow’s milk consumption has dropped by 40% since 1975, according to data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, while roughly one in three U.S. adults now drink vegan milk at least weekly.

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. For more information, please visit PETA.org or follow the group on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram.