Edie Falco Fights the Dairy Industry’s Organized Crimes

On the 25th anniversary of her Emmy-winning role in The Sopranos, PETA Honorary Director Edie Falco went head to head with shady characters again. In a powerful TV spot (see it below) that aired ahead of the most-watched Super Bowl in history, she shows why it’s time for the milk mafia to get pinched.

It starts as comedy and ends as high drama: Edie is back in the family’s New Jersey kitchen making pizza when men burst in and swipe her block of cheese. As she begs them not to take it away and desperately chases after them, the surreal scene cuts to real footage of a mother cow frantically chasing a truck that’s carrying away her calf. It’s a common sight on dairy farms, which tear newborn calves away from their highly distraught mothers so that the milk they produce for the sole purpose of nourishing their babies can be sold for human consumption.

The male babies end up as veal, while the females are raised to replace their mothers when their mothers’ bodies give out, and today’s cows are then forcibly re-impregnated on a “rape rack” to keep the milk flowing. Everyone has to ask themselves: Are the feelings of the calf and his mother less important than having dairy cheese or yogurt?

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“I am a mom,” Edie said during a Q&A about the ad. “But you don’t need to be a mom to understand that animals have emotional lives and they care about their offspring. … It is my hope that people will start to understand the ramifications of ripping offspring from their mothers and just how traumatizing that is.”

The ad racked up tens of millions of views and had people agreeing to swear off milk and cheese.

But rape and kidnapping are only part of dairy’s dirty business.

It’s No Dairy Tale

As investigations by PETA entities have shown again and again, cows on dairy factory farms invariably live amid their own manure and urine and suffer from untreated illnesses and injuries like pink eye and mastitis. Recently, a whistleblower sent PETA photos and video evidence reportedly gathered at Lone Star Organic Dairy in Texas – then a supplier to Horizon Organic – showing extreme suffering and mass deaths.

The whistleblower recounted that multiple cows fell into a 14-foot-deep waste pit. One of the cows – filmed weakly treading in this fecal soup – could reportedly barely walk by the time she was finally pulled out and sold for slaughter, no doubt to become hamburger meat.

It was reported that other cows were injured by barbed-wire fencing as they tried to reach the grass and hay dumped on the other side of it. And blind calves were reportedly put in a pen with electrified fencing and repeatedly shocked by it. Bedding provided to the animals reportedly had nails in it that injured and crippled them, and other bedding was drenched in waste. The eyewitness described how cows were fitted with collars that became painfully embedded in their necks as they grew, causing wounds and abscesses.

And we were informed that most calves born at the facility died from untreated ailments, including diarrhea (“scours”) and pneumonia. Photographs showed dead animals strewn across the property.

After PETA sent this evidence to Horizon Organic, the company stopped sourcing from Lone Star. We’ve made urgent appeals to the US Department of Agriculture and Organic Certifiers, the farm’s certifying agent under the National Organic Program.