‘Not Your Mom, Not Your Milk’ Ad Aims to Honor Cows Who Died During Blizzard

Pro-Vegan PETA Memorial Will Pay Tribute to More Than 1,800 Recently Deceased Mother Cows in Washington State

For Immediate Release:
February 19, 2019

Contact:
Brooke Rossi 202-483-7382

In honor of the more than 1,800 cows who died on Yakima Valley dairy farms during a recent blizzard, PETA plans to place a billboard in the area showing a cow and her calf next to the words “Not Your Mom? Not Your Milk! Choose Vegan.“

“Cows with no protection from the elements were forced to huddle together in a desperate attempt to get warm, leaving many of them crushed or trampled to death,” says PETA Director Danielle Katz. “PETA hopes to pay tribute to their suffering with a billboard reminding people that the best way to prevent mother cows from suffering in the dairy industry is to go vegan.”

In today’s dairy industry, cows are kept almost constantly pregnant in order to maximize milk production. Calves are taken away from their mothers within hours or days of birth so that their mothers’ milk can be consumed by humans instead. Male calves are typically shipped off to be slaughtered for the veal industry, while female calves endure the same fate as their mothers: repeated forced insemination with a “pregnancy gun” until their milk production wanes, at which point they’re sent to the slaughterhouse.

PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to eat”—notes that extreme and unexpected weather events such as this blizzard will become more frequent as the planet is increasingly affected by climate change and that according to some estimates, animal agriculture is responsible for more greenhouse gases than the entire global transportation sector.

For more information, please visit PETA.org.