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via Womanist Musings
Masters of Asshatery PETA have a solution to Ben & Jerry exploiting those poor dairy cows to make their ice cream. Exploit women instead!
Won't you give cows and their babies a break and our health a boost by switching from cow's milk to breast milk in Ben and Jerry's ice cream?
Important question, PETA! I'll allow Libertarian presidential candidate Bob Barr answer that one.
4 comments:
Did you read the letter yourself or did you just repeat the anti-PETA spin coming from certain anti-animal circles?
The bulk of the letter was this:
"Using cow's milk for your ice cream is a hazard to your customer's health. Dairy products have been linked to juvenile diabetes, allergies, constipation, obesity, and prostate and ovarian cancer. The late Dr. Benjamin Spock, America's leading authority on child care, spoke out against feeding cow's milk to children, saying it may play a role in anemia, allergies, and juvenile diabetes and in the long term, will set kids up for obesity and heart disease-America's number one cause of death.
Animals will also benefit from the switch to breast milk. Like all mammals, cows only produce milk during and after pregnancy, so to be able to constantly milk them, cows are forcefully impregnated every nine months. After several years of living in filthy conditions and being forced to produce 10 times more milk than they would naturally, their exhausted bodies are turned into hamburgers or ground up for soup.
And of course, the veal industry could not survive without the dairy industry. Because male calves can't produce milk, dairy farmers take them from their mothers immediately after birth and sell them to veal farms, where they endure 14 to17 weeks of torment chained inside a crate so small that they can't even turn around."
I've already read that part of PETA's statement, which is totally irrelevant to what I posted about. PETA has a very long history of sacrificing the personhood and dignity of women in the name of protecting animals. While one can support animal welfare and rights from a feminist perspective, one certainly cannot defend PETA from a feminist perspective (although I think caring about cows is as close as PETA will get to ever caring about women. After all, both have breasts). The nutritional value of human breast milk compared to cow's or any other animal's milk is not the point here. The point is that PETA would rather see women exploited for their milk than cows. Whether it's women or cows, somebody's going to be exploited by the milk industry (and if you don't think poor and uneducated women would be subjected to the same horrors that dairy cows are, then you must live in a fantasy world). The exploitation is what has to change, not where the milk comes from, and that's what PETA has never understood, because their publicity depends completely on their own exploitation of women.
"The point is that PETA would rather see women exploited for their milk than cows."
That "point" is invalid when PETA's letter is taken in context. That "point" is only valid if you deliberately mischaracterize PETA.
You do realize that no one would be discussing this if PETA asked Ben & Jerry to use soy milk in their ice cream, right? You can't exploit beans. As for taking PETA's comments out of context, what context exactly? It's not okay to suggest that women be exploited for their breast milk. That's not a solution. That would just create more of a problem. It doesn't matter that they mixed in that sexist suggestion with some educational information about the treatment of dairy cows and the health issues associated with cow's milk. Their suggestion is still sexist.
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