Company Sells Pink Animal-Torture Devices for Breast Cancer Awareness

Exactly how stupid does Agri-Plastics think women are?

The company is marketing pink calf hutches during Breast Cancer Awareness Month and calling them “Hutches for Hope.” My hope is that this is all a joke.

Calf hutches are the tiny plastic crates that baby calves are shoved into after they’re torn away from their mothers on dairy farms. Cows produce milk at the same time human women do: when they are pregnant or have just given birth. So to keep them producing milk, dairy farms force cows to go through a constant cycle of artificial insemination on a “rape rack,” pregnancy, and childbirth, and then their babies are torn away from them so that humans can drink the mothers’ milk.

Female calves born on dairy farms are isolated in these hutches and forcibly impregnated as soon as they mature. Male calves have it just as bad: Since they’re useless to the dairy industry, they’re sold into the veal or beef industry to be killed for their flesh.

This horror is what Agri-Plastics wants people to buy into. For breast cancer awareness, of course. It doesn’t take much deconstruction of this deceptive rhetoric to see the company’s hypocrisy: claiming to care about a reproductive-system disease in one group of females while manipulating and wreaking havoc on the reproductive systems of another.

Um, we are all aware of breast cancer by now. And we’re also aware of pinkwashing and companies trying to use breast cancer marketing to sell their products—even when the products are part of the problem.

The American Cancer Society maintains that one-third of all cancer deaths in the United States can be attributed to dietary factors. Studies conducted around the globe have led researchers to conclude that consuming animal fat, especially from red meat and high-fat dairy “products,” increases one’s risk of developing breast cancer.

Perhaps Dr. T. Colin Campbell, professor emeritus of nutritional biochemistry at Cornell University and one of the world’s foremost experts on nutrition, summed it up best: “[N]o chemical carcinogen is nearly so important in causing human cancer as animal protein.”

And to top it off, Agri-Plastics is purporting to be partnering with the National Breast Cancer Foundation, an organization that wastes money on cruel, antiquated experiments on animals that after decades and billions of dollars have failed to produce a cure.

Richard Klausner, former head of the National Cancer Institute (NCI), has observed, “The history of cancer research has been a history of curing cancer in the mouse. We have cured mice of cancer for decades and it simply didn’t work in humans.” The NCI now uses human cancer cells, taken by biopsy during surgery, to perform first-stage testing for new anti-cancer drugs, sparing the 1 million mice the agency previously used annually and giving us all a much better shot at combating cancer.

So the Agri-Plastics sales strategy goes something like this: Buy pink plastic crates, use them to kidnap babies from their mothers for a product that actually promotes cancer in humans, and then we’ll donate money to an organization that will waste it killing more animals and not doing a damn bit of good. But do it because it’s pink!

I’m not sure what’s more insulting: the fact that this company is hawking carcinogens and cruelty for breast cancer awareness or the fact that it doesn’t think women will be smart enough to see past the color pink.