PETA's Proposed Cow Empathy Museum: Good for Cows and the Community

animalrights.change / CC

Dean Foods is mooving out. It's closing two of its PET Dairy plants—one in Portsmouth, Virginia, and another in Kingsport, Tennessee, which means that milk production at the facilities will slowly dry up over the next two months.

PETA wants to lease the Portsmouth facility (located just across the river from our headquarters in Norfolk) and turn it into a Cow Empathy Museum, which would enlighten visitors about how cows and their calves suffer on dairy farms. The museum would offer interactive displays so that visitors could be hooked up to a milking machine or crammed into a small crate to give them a taste of the dairy industry's routine cruelty to animals. They'd also learn "cowlture" facts—for example, cows form social hierarchies within their herds, and many cows who have been separated from their calves will do anything they can to find their babies.

Once they are done learning about all the reasons that dairy is a downer, visitors could order soy ice cream treats and other tasty vegan foods in the Cow Empathy Restaurant. And everyone 12 years old or younger would receive a plush toy cow with a tag reading, "Cows Are Cool! Dump Dairy!"

Fingers crossed that the laid-off dairy employees will soon be toasting in celebration of their new jobs at the Cow Empathy Museum, with an ice-cold glass of Silk.

Written by Karin Bennett