Fighting for Dairy Cows

by Melissa Edelman

Oregon State Police arrested five Oregon State University students last January 28 and cited them for second-degree criminal trespass—ending their twelve-hour occupation of the office of the dean of OSU's veterinary school. Eight students began the sit-in, to protest a veterinary class in which students practiced their surgery techniques on euthanized dogs and cats. The protesters chained themselves together to show how the animals have no choice but to submit to their deadly fate. University administrators, concerned that the students would die if left chained inside the building all weekend, called in the police.

Animal rights protests are becoming increasingly common on college campuses nationwide, as students mimic the high-profile publicity stunts of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), the country's largest animal advocacy group.

Caged Up

On September 30, 1999, Cornell University students locked themselves in cages on Ho Plaza, a main thoroughfare for students, to protest primate experimentation at the University. Their protest involved a water-only hunger-strike for 72 hours. Their strike was a meager sacrifice, the students explained, compared to the pain animals endure in the labs of Professor Peter Nathanielsz, who leads experiments involving catheters and electrodes on pregnant rhesus monkeys and sheep.

Before they commenced the cage-in, the students registered the protest with the Cornell administration, who approved it.

Invasion of the Pigs

Cincinnati will be the next city to which PETA will take its fight against “animal sacrifice.” Cincinnati will become a museum to life-sized fiberglass pigs in May, reliving its nineteenth-century nickname, “the Porkopolis,” according to a March 23 press release from PETA. Two of PETA's decorated pigs will ask citizens to remind themselves of the animals that become Sunday brunch.

“PETA wants consumers to know that pigs are sentient beings who, like humans and other animals, experience fear and pain” in their confined stalls and in artificially high hormone levels. Pigs, PETA reports, are routinely castrated, relieved of their tails and teeth, hung upside down, and left to die through blood loss.

The PETA campaigns webpage records students' personal objections to college-instituted dissections in science classes: “We had to cut open live baby turtles and pour solution on their hearts, then cut out the hearts and test various chemicals on them,” recounts one student. “They told me the turtles were `brain dead,' but, when I poured solution on the turtle he lifted his head and gasped.”

With similar dissections at every college, some Dartmouth students hold the same views but haven't taken such action against milk drinking or animal experiments recently. PETA does, however, offer non-militant actions for college students, perhaps even Dartmouth students: “Trick or Treat on Halloween for dog or cat food to donate to the shelter,” they suggest. Gather a Dartmouth `stray' dog and take it along trick or treating. Who could possibly resist?

Got Beer?

As part of its “Dump Dairy” Campaign to protest how the dairy industry inflicts pain and suffering on cows and calves, PETA recently launched a “Got Beer?” Campaign, aimed primarily at college students. PETA's message is that humans should not drink milk, a drink fortified which calcium, which actually strains calcium from bones; beer is the solution.

Three glasses of milk per day may lead to a stroke, says PETA, while three cups of beer per day may cause a slight hangover the next until one builds a healthy tolerance. “Drinking Responsibly Means Not Drinking Milk—Save a Cow's Life.”

Many mothers, of course, insist that their children drink milk, since it provides much of a child's needed intake of calcium. PETA, however, attacks the $300-million-a-year dairy industry for perpetrating the fiction that milk is a miracle drink, a path to assured health. Big Dairy also hides that milk and cheese contain very high levels of cholesterol and fat, are oftentimes contaminated by pesticides and drugs, are linked to cancers, heart disease, and diabetes, and might even lead to osteoporosis.

PETA asserts that in three of the highest dairy consuming countries in the world—the US, Norway and Switzerland—women have the highest rates of osteoporosis. In countries where women do not consume nearly as many dairy products, such as Japan and China, few people show signs of the disease. PETA also lauds a Harvard Nurses' study that found that women who drink three glasses of milk each day have twice as many bone fractures as women who drink little if any milk.

PETA's primary concern, though, isn't people's health, but cows'. Dairy farms, they report, chain mother cows by their necks to a stall for months and genetically alter their udders to produce more milk and to drain all their body fluids. Farms use artificial insemination to maintain high levels of milk production. If females give birth to males, farms kill the calves within days to provide veal to the milk-drinking human population.

In addition, PETA states that the production of milk in both humans and cows requires exorbitant amounts of food—thus the entire process expends energy and water. Humans are the only mammals to drink milk from a different mammal: the cow.

PETA provides the solution that rather than abuse cows to drink this harmful milk, we should drink beer. Why? Several reasons:

Beer has no fat, no cholesterol, half a gram of fiber per cup, three grams of complex carbohydrates in a twelve ounce glass, only twelve milligrams of sodium per cup, and no pesticides, hormones, or antibiotic drugs. Milk, in contrast, has high levels of fat, 20 milligrams of cholesterol in an eight-ounce serving, no fiber, no complex carbohydrates, high levels of sodium, and every pesticide and antibiotic that cows intake. One such hormone is rBGH, a growth hormone that leads to breast growth in men.

Whereas dairy products may cause obesity, heart disease, and allergies, beer may only result in light-headedness. If intake exceeds a person's tolerance, one may have to expel the beer; after a few glasses of milk, one would have to do the same.

Despite the many reasons why beer is an adequate substitute for milk, PETA encloses a disclaimer that fresh juices, soy milk, and mineral water may be better substitutes for milk than beer.

Through its appeal to college students through the “Got Beer?” campaign, though, PETA's answer that beer is good speaks for itself. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, the largest animal rights organization in the world, thus extols beer over milk, even as colleges across the country are stepping up efforts to reduce beer consumption among college students. The Trustees of Dartmouth College, it seems, are contributing to the mistreatment of dairy of cows. Too bad Dartmouth's now-defunct Animal Advocacy group didn't testify before the Committee on the Student Life Initiative.

When a newborn baby cries for milk from its mother who cannot produce enough to eradicate its hunger, its mother should not give it milk. The PETA campaign perhaps would encourage a mother to top a beer bottle with a sucking device and leave the milk bottle on the kitchen stove.

“As bizarre and insensitive as all of this sounds, no one should really be surprised,” reads a March 17 editorial in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. “PETA is a group, after all, that often treats common sense the way it does veal parmesan—something to be avoided at all costs.”

A cage-in at any institution is pretty easy to effect; college students are prone to all sorts of peculiar stunts. A ban on milk, though, is a direct challenge to Big Dairy and its cereal co-conspirators—not to mention Nestle and Quick. Starbucks might close or else increase its coffee prices even more. Chai would not be the soothing, aromatic, funky tea—stick to plain tea with honey. Too bad steamed water does not have a frothy mixture. Does steamed beer?