Dairy Farm Cruelty Prompts Lanco-Pennland Protest
PETA Seeks Action After Exposé Reveals Beatings, Neglect, Death at Reitz Dairy
For Immediate Release:
July 10, 2019
Contact:
Brooke Rossi 202-483-7382
On Thursday, PETA protesters will gather in Hagerstown, the home of Lanco-Pennland, to urge the cheesemaker to reconsider its relationship with the National Farmers Organization, which ships milk from Reitz Dairy Farm in Shamokin Township, Pennsylvania. The protesters will screen footage from the damning new PETA eyewitness exposé revealing that cows at Reitz were beaten, kept in their own waste, and denied veterinary care.
When: Thursday, July 11, 12 noon
Where: At the intersection of W. Washington Street and Summit Avenue, Hagerstown
“No slice of cheese justifies beating an animal or leaving lame ones to suffer from seeping, swollen injuries,” says PETA Executive Vice President Tracy Reiman. “PETA is calling on Lanco-Pennland to examine its ties to the National Farmers Organization and its link to the filth and misery found at Reitz Dairy Farm.”
A worker at the dairy farm was recorded striking a cow who lay trapped in a milking stall nearly 60 times with a cane on her hindquarters, legs, and sensitive udder. A manager denied cows care for obvious injuries, including massively swollen joints seeping blood and pus. Cows limped through their own waste—one later died in it—and calves were separated from their mothers and kept in a barn amid urine and manure before the females were later inseminated and used for milk production. In response to the findings, the Pennsylvania State Police ordered the farmer to provide injured cows with veterinary care and have opened an investigation.
PETA has received four whistleblower complaints from Reitz Dairy Farm since 2014. In 2016, a whistleblower reported that the farm’s owner and his son forced cows to lie in their own waste, let udder infections go untreated, slit the throats of conscious cows, and more. PETA’s 2009 investigation of the farm found that cows were kicked, electrically shocked, and jabbed with a blade.
PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to eat or abuse in any other way”—opposes speciesism, which is a human-supremacist worldview. For more information, please visit PETA.org.
