‘De-calf Your Coffee’: Vegan Message Percolates in Albany Ahead of Annual ‘Dairy Day’
For Immediate Release:
May 21, 2018
Contact:
Audrey Shircliff 202-483-7382
Just ahead of Albany’s annual Dairy Day (June 7), PETA is putting a vegan message in the hands of state capital coffee drinkers. As senators from top dairy-producing states seek to ban the word “milk” from packaging and advertising for every form of milk except dairy milk, PETA is launching a campaign in hundreds of coffee shops in these states, with cup sleeves that read, “De-Calf Your Coffee: Dairy Is Udder Cruelty. Choose Almond, Soy, or Coconut Milk.”
In Albany, 1,200 of the coffee sleeves will appear at the Daily Grind on Lark Street, where legislators and aides stop on their way to work at the New York State Capitol half a mile away.
Before June—National Dairy Month—nearly 20,000 of PETA’s cruelty-free creamer sleeves will adorn cups of coffee in the state capitals of New York, California, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Wisconsin, “America’s Dairyland.” New York is home to Reps. John Faso and Claudia Tenney, who recently joined cosponsors Reps. Elise Stafanik and Chris Collins in supporting the controversial Dairy Pride Act—which aims to “prohibit the sale of any food that uses the market name of a dairy product [but] is not the milk of a hooved animal.”
“Learning of the conditions under which cow’s milk is obtained leaves a sour taste in your mouth,” says PETA Vice President Dan Mathews. “That’s why so many consumers are ditching the dairy variety for coconut, almond, oat, hazelnut, and soy milks.”
PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to eat”—notes that like humans, cows produce milk in order to nourish their own young. But on today’s factory farms, cows are artificially inseminated (raped by syringe) and calves are torn away from their loving mothers within a day of birth, causing both extreme distress. Mother cows sometimes wail for their calves for days after separation. Male calves are often locked up in veal crates, and females are sentenced to the same miserable fate as their mothers. Learn more here.
PETA launched the national campaign through New York–based Brite Media Group, which contracts with independent coffee shops across the country, and has plans to place the ads in more top dairy-producing states in June.
