PETA’S ‘Dump Dairy’ Campaign Targets Scottish Schools
For Immediate Release:
4 October 2002
Contact:
Sean Gifford – 020 7357 9229, ext. 226 (office); 0773 457 9092 (mobile)
Dawn Carr – 020 7357 9229, ext. 224
Edinburgh — The dairy industry may have declared 7th to the 11th October ‘National School Milk Week’, but young people may find milk a little hard to swallow after seeing PETA’s controversial but whimsical ‘Milk Sucker’ trading cards. The group’s director of campaigns, Sean Gifford, joined by a giant ‘cow’, will kick off its Scottish ‘Dump Dairy’ Campaign by handing the cards out to youngsters as they leave school in three of Scotland’s largest cities, starting in Edinburgh:
Date: Wednesday, 9th October
Time: 3 p.m. sharp
Place: James Gillespie High School, Lauderdale Street
Aggressive pro-milk marketing campaigns have persuaded Scottish schoolchildren to guzzle 25 per cent more obesity-inducing, fatty milk than children in the rest of the UK, so now PETA is bringing its cast of ‘dairy-damaged’ characters to students throughout Scotland. The eye-catching and stomach-turning Milk Suckers trading cards feature ‘Spotty Sue’, ‘Windy Wendy’, ‘Chubby Charlie’, and ‘Phlegmy Phil’, all suffering from ill-health effects associated with drinking milk, eating tubs of ice cream and piling on the cheese. The backs of the cards warn children that dairy products can cause an array of unpleasant side effects, such as wind and a throat full of phlegm. Milk has also been linked to more serious health problems, including heart disease, cancer, stroke and even osteoporosis — the very disease the dairy industry tries to convince us it helps prevent.
Why else is PETA encouraging kids to ‘dump dairy’? Nowadays, cows are genetically manipulated to produce at least three times the amount of milk they would normally need for their offspring, the calves who are torn from them shortly after birth, causing intense distress to both cow and calf. Dairy cows suffer from agonising ailments, including unnaturally heavy udders, udder infections and lameness from carrying too much weight on their frames, and are usually shipped off to slaughter at a fraction of their natural life spans.
‘Children would spit out their milk if they knew how cows suffer in the dairy industry’, says Gifford, whose great-grandparents founded a large dairy company in the American Midwest. Last year, he launched the group’s ‘Milk Suckers’ Campaign right in the heart of ‘America’s Dairyland’ and took it to schools throughout the US.
Visit PETA’s Web site MilkSucks.co.uk to view the Milk Suckers trading cards.