‘De-calf Your Coffee’: Vegan Message Percolates in Pittsburgh Ahead of ‘National Dairy Month’
For Immediate Release:
May 23, 2018
Contact:
Audrey Shircliff 202-483-7382
Just ahead of June’s National Dairy Month promotions, PETA is putting a vegan message in the hands of Pittsburgh coffee drinkers. As politicians seek to ban the word “milk” from packaging and advertising for every form of milk except dairy milk, PETA is launching a campaign in coffee shops in top dairy-producing states, with cup sleeves that read, “De-Calf Your Coffee: Dairy Is Udder Cruelty. Choose Almond, Soy, or Coconut Milk.”
In Pittsburgh, thousands of the coffee sleeves will appear at several cafés throughout the city. Pennsylvania ranks sixth in the nation for dairy production.
Nearly 20,000 of PETA’s cruelty-free creamer sleeves will adorn cups of coffee in cities in New York, California, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Wisconsin, “America’s Dairyland.” The campaign skewers the controversial Dairy Pride Act—which aims to “prohibit the sale of any food that uses the market name of a dairy product [but] is not the milk of a hooved animal.”
“Learning of the conditions under which cow’s milk is obtained leaves a sour taste in your mouth,” says PETA Vice President Dan Mathews. “That’s why so many consumers are ditching the dairy variety for coconut, almond, oat, hazelnut, and soy milks.”
PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to eat”—notes that like humans, cows produce milk in order to nourish their own young. But on today’s factory farms, cows are artificially inseminated (raped by syringe) and calves are torn away from their loving mothers within a day of birth, causing both extreme distress. Mother cows sometimes wail for their calves for days after separation. Male calves are often locked up in veal crates, and females are sentenced to the same miserable fate as their mothers. Learn more here.
PETA launched the national campaign through New York–based Brite Media Group, which contracts with independent coffee shops across the country, and has plans to place the ads in more top dairy-producing states in June.
