Los Angeles Native Goes on ‘Warped Tour’ With Provocative Anti-Dairy Display

For Immediate Release:
June 27, 2017

Contact:
Sophia Charchuk 202-483-7382

From Seattle to Massachusetts (and just about everywhere in between), music fans are flocking to the Vans Warped Tour, where they’ll see not only artists like Andy Black, Hawthorne Heights, and Falling in Reverse—but also Los Angeles native Ricardo Payan, who is on the tour crew for peta2, PETA’s youth division (whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to eat”).

In dozens of cities this summer, Payan will help run peta2’s “Not Your Mom, Not Your Milk” booth, which uses interactive games, stickers, wristbands, and more to challenge visitors to consider why it’s as unnatural for humans to drink cows’ milk as it is for cats to drink giraffes’ milk—and why it’s cruel to tear calves away from their mothers so that humans can drink their milk instead.

Payan, who just finished the postgraduate teaching credential program at California State University–Long Beach could share how he went vegetarian as a teenager to impress a girl he had a crush on—but after learning more about the suffering of animals in the dairy industry, he went vegan and “never looked back.” He ran his college’s animal rights organization, Cease Animal Torture, and his biggest victory for animals was getting his school to break its contract with SeaWorld, meaning ticket sales to the abusement park were permanently banned on campus.