Right before the Democratic National Convention, here in LA, some guy in a pig suit dumped a dump-truck load of manure in front of the hotel where the DNC leaders were staying. Neat pictures of a giant pig being arrested by the police.
Of course, it was PETA. Of course, I do not know exactly what they were protesting.
The PETA people dumped their “Got Beer” campaign?
I would suppose that PETA didn’t have a problem
with drunk driving, as long as you don’t hit
an animal.
A couple years ago, a normal “Got Milk?” billboard showing a peanut butter sandwich was vandalized. The hoodlums spray painted the sandwich so that it was dripping blood, and changed the slogan to read, “Got tainted milk?”.
I had no idea who did it at the time. But now that I read this thread, I’m wondering if this wasn’t a local PETA stunt…
No. It was a campaign against PreMarin, get PETA’s story here http://www.menopauseonline.com/ . They had an ad in time with a character from “starangers with candy” I think. She had a big swipe of urine around her upper lip. Yech.
Here’s what I was told by a friend of mine (dairy farmer in Switzerland) - cows have to be milked every day because otherwise they are in pain.
Through cross-breeding humans have managed to alter cows so that they have enlarged, “freakish” milk-producing organs. I imagine that is why the objection to milk. Besides of course the issue of animals being imprisoned.
As far as the “Got Prostate Cancer?” campaign.
If PETA’s goals is to convince members of the general public to join their organization, I would say (based on the responses I see in this thread) that they have failed.
If their intent is to give greater publicity to the study claiming a possible link between dair products and prostate cancer, they have succeeded. I myself was unaware of this study until I saw IzzyR’s original post.
So you might say that their methods are at least partially effective.
I think my favorite PETA escapade was when they ‘rescued’ a bunch of rabbits from a middle school in Montgomery County, MD, and then euthanized them. (This happened about a decade ago. I’ve got the Washington Post clipping of the story, but no date.)
While I hardly consider myself an animal-rights type, I believe that to the extent that we choose to take animals under our stewardship, we have an obligation to see that they have decent living conditions. I agree with Phil that PETA’s (well-deserved, IMO) image damages the credibility of others who would attempt to work for better conditions for animals, regardless of their motivation.
Having observed ranching close up (my uncle used to make his living that way), I suspect that most of the bad treatment of farm animals is due to the corporatization of agriculture, rather than an inherent part of raising cattle, chicken, pigs, and whatnot. The typical family farmer is a lot less prone to squeezing a lot of animals into far too little space than the typical agribusiness corporation, whose executives and stockholders don’t have to daily observe the conditions under which their animals live. Consequently, I think the best first step to protect animals’ welfare is the same as that for protecting human welfare at this time in our history: bar corporations from participation in the political process, and strip them of their ‘right’ to free speech, limiting these rights to flesh-and-blood human beings.
[/manifesto]
Well, yeah. That and eating them. 
Yer pal,
Satan
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They only have to be milked all the time because they are kept pregnant all the time, producing more cows, bulls and veal calves.
If someone had used my mother’s cancer without her permission to advance their goals, whether or not I agreed with them, “offended” wouldn’t even begin to describe how I would feel.
Well, you can’t make a cow pregnant when she’s not ovulating, can you? Left to her own devices, she’d probably get pregnant again anyway, because that’s what animals in heat do. Yes, farmers do artifically inseminate them, but, at least in my family’s experience, that’s because it’s too dangerous to keep a bull on the place (bulls being aggressive, ill-tempered, huge, and willing to go through anyone and anything to get to a female in heat). So, aside from the mechanism of aritifically inseminating them, are the farmers really doing anything unnatural to the cows?
Dairy farms unatural? As someone who has seen large dairy farms, I’d have to say there isn’t nesecarily anything unatural about miliking cows. the ways that is is carried out in masas production are definetly unatural and extremely cruel.
I agree that it’s not right that on some farms cows aren’t allowed outside at all. There’s a large dairy like that near my home, and I’ve never seen a single cow. I’ve heard it’s because people complain that cows’ waste pollutes the ground water. But if you ever make it over to Tillamook, OR, “Land of Cheese, Trees, and Ocean Breeze,” you’ll see there are dairy cows all over the place, and they appear to be content and healthy. What about their lives is cruel and unnatural?
Nothing that I’m aware of. However, in large production farms cows are kept in inhumane conditions. Many times they spend their entire life without moving. the majority of milk and cheese does not come from Tilamook county.
Well… it should, dammit!
I wish I understood why modern commercial dairies do what they do. Like I said, there is a local dairy that, I assume, has lots of cows, yet I’ve never seen a one because they are always kept inside. Why is that? I’ve heard that supposedly their waste pollutes the ground water, yet the farm uses water from its own sewage pond to irrigate the fields. Is that pond really treated to remove any and all pollutants?
It’s probably all a matter of money. If that dairy quit growing crops in its fields and let the cows graze there, they’d lose the money the crops bring in. If they had fewer cows and could give them more room, the dairy would lose money. They’d probably jack up the price of milk to get that money back and hurt the consumer.
So I guess I know the answer, but I have a hard time accepting it. We had happy cows, I know we did, so it chaps my hide to hear all dairy farmers painted with the broad brush of animal cruelty. But other dairies aren’t so kind to their animals because it’s not economical. The almighty dollar is more important than letting a cow have a little sunshine and green grass and fresh air.
If I had my druthers, I’d buy my own milk cow and boycott, but I don’t think we’d get a good enough return on our investment, unless we did it the big business way and crammed a couple dozen cows behind the house which would defeat the purpose (plus hubby already gripes about picking up the dog doo in the back yard, he probably wouldn’t appreciate pitching cow pies).
I think I’ll wait until they actually prove it, rather than bet on a “maybe”.
Saint Zero: I never said that the study had definitive results. I am saying that I had never heard of the study until Izzy R mentioned it as a result of the PETA campaign. I did conclude that PETA’s publicity methods are effective in some ways.
PETA appears to assume all dairies are cruel. The small dairies will be hurt much more by a small drop in sales than the large dairies. This doesn’t really make the people working with the cows want to be nicer. I think it is a poorly thought out strategy, but I don’t really understand their arguments well anyhow.
Gr8Kat - A dairy farm indoors? That doesn’t sound right. I know veal is kept imobile, but dairy cows? The term dairy refers to both places where cows are kept and milked and to milk processing facilities. The two used to be mostly combined, but now a days are frequently seperate. If you haven’t seen a cow there, then they probably don’t have them and they just process the milk into cheese, butter, etc. The dairy farms, where the cows are, have processing buildings too, but they are smaller, and are generally just for the pasturizing before the moo juices is put onto milk truck.
I don’t know about the cruelty or cancer issues, but I heard a story about a new carousel type milking arrangement that was kind of odd, and a the same time shows that a cows life isn’t all suffering. Rather than the rack style arrangement that most dairy farms use, this place installed a large circular platform that spins slowly. The cows line up and get on this thing, the milk is pumped into a holding tank in the center, and they get off. The dairymen like it because they can get the cows on and off one at a time in line, unlike the racks, and the cows seem to like the motion, kind of like a merry-go-round for farm animals. They had bulls watching, and getting restless, so they decided to give them a turn too. The bulls lined up and rode around, and appearantly it calmed them down. The dairymen thought it was hilarious.
As I understand it, and I am not an expert (I help with refrigeration), most large dairies have bulls and cows seperate, but at least some of each and sort of close, because if they can’t smell each other they behave badly.
Sounds weird, but I asked why they had bulls at the dairy and that’s what they told me.
Engineer, oldscratch is the one who says he’s been in dairies where cows aren’t allowed to even move, so I assume that’s indoors. I have not seen cows at this local dairy but I’m relatively certain they’re there because: 1.) they have a big pond of cow waste right out by the highway that I’m pretty sure wasn’t trucked in; 2.) they recently (within the last 10 years or so) made the news when a bout of botulism (dead mouse contaminated the hay) killed off a large percentage of the herd; and 3.) I have a friend who used to work there and I’m pretty sure he mentioned cows–I can e-mail him and double check if you like.
My position is on a slippery slope that: 1.) dairy farming is not cruel and unnatural when done right; but 2.) I’ll concede that a percentage (I have no idea what percentage) of dairies don’t do it right. I can’t agree with PETA’s stance that any and all dairy farming is cruel, that the very process of keeping cows and harvesting their milk is inhumane. But I’m also sure that I would be horrified by the conditions that some cows are kept in if I saw them first hand.
I’m afraid I don’t know much about that, other than what I’ve been told, too 
My family raised Jerseys, and what my folks told me is that Jersey bulls are particularly mean. They had a bull on the place once, but decided it was too dangerous and got rid of him. I don’t know that the cows’ behavior changed any when he was gone.
When my mom raised her own steers for meat, they were, of course, castrated very young (I don’t know if that’s cruel or inhumane, either. It was done with a rubberband around the scrotum with the assumption that, after circulation was cut off, it would lose feeling long before it dropped off. Is that any less humane than cutting into and stitching up your cat’s scrotum? The anesthetic does wear off eventually, you know, and I don’t think my cats have ever been giving kitty vicodin to relieve post-surgical pain–but I digress). My point is (and I do have one), once we had a steer–I think his name was Henry–that didn’t act castrated. When the neighbor’s cows came into heat, he would literally jump the electric fence to get to them. Yes, jump! We added another line to make it taller, but he also climbed under it. Bulls (or steers that think they’re bulls) are very determined! I think we had Henry-burgers earlier than we’d intended just because he was such a pain in the neck.
My real point (here it comes) is that Henry could smell the females, he behaved badly! The end.