DeCALF Your Coffee! PETA to Protest Starbucks’ Vegan Surcharge

For Immediate Release:
May 12, 2021

Contact:
Brooke Rossi 202-483-7382

Because Starbucks agrees that animal-friendly vegan milks are better for the planet but still charges extra for them, PETA protesters will descend on the chain’s store on N. Downer Avenue tomorrow with an extremely lifelike calf prop stuffed inside a Starbucks cup, which is guaranteed to stop shoppers in their tracks.

When:    Thursday, May 13, 12 noon

Where:    Starbucks, 2551 N. Downer Ave. (at the intersection with E. Webster Place), Milwaukee

“Starbucks is milking customers who care about animals and the planet,” says PETA Executive Vice President Tracy Reiman. “Cruelty to cows aside, dairy is an environmental disaster, with its methane emissions and the destruction of forests for grazing land, so PETA is calling on the company to put its money where its mouth is and price vegan milks at or below the price of cow’s milk.”

Dairy farms are part of animal agriculture—the leading cause of water pollution, ocean dead zones, species extinction, and habitat destruction. By some estimates, it also generates more greenhouse-gas emissions than the world’s entire transportation sector.

Each person who goes vegan lowers their carbon footprint and saves the lives of nearly 200 animals every year. Cows in the dairy industry are artificially inseminated—workers insert an arm into the animals’ rectum and a metal rod into their vagina—and sent to slaughter when their bodies give out.

PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to eat”—opposes speciesism, a human-supremacist worldview.

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