Vantressa Brown: Peta's banned"SPEW MILK" ad will run in local school yearbook

Fresno, Calif. — Thanks to its progressive and open-minded advertising policy, Roosevelt High School is going to do something that schools and billboard companies in Omaha, Neb.; Miami; Austin, Texas; and Los Angeles refused to do: run PETA’s dairy-industry parody ad that shows a teen with milk gushing from his mouth and nose, with the caption, "Got milk? If you knew how dairy cows suffered, you’d spew!" The ad will run in the school yearbook, scheduled for distribution on May 19, and leads readers to MilkSucks.com, a PETA Web site that is loaded with facts about the suffering of cast-off calves and their worn-out mothers, as well as information on the deleterious effects of milk-drinking.

The deliberately disgusting ad, which can be seen at MilkSucks.com, is a big hit with high school students, who are being heavily targeted by the dairy industry in certain regions of the country. Milk marketers are struggling to revive dwindling sales with gimmicks like putting brightly colored bottles of sugary, flavored milk in school-cafeteria vending machines.

PETA’s experience is that many kids have a cow when shown that the dairy industry treats its animals as inanimate "milk machines." Most kids are repulsed when they hear that male calves born on dairy farms are traumatically torn from their mothers shortly after birth, put into crates so small that they cannot turn around, and, after 14 weeks in darkness and filth, shipped off to slaughter for veal. Many of the babies stumble to their deaths because their legs are so swollen and sore from balancing on slippery, waste-covered, slatted floors or concrete.

Besides causing "inconveniences," such as skin blemishes, gas, excessive phlegm, and the severe discomfort of lactose intolerance, cow’s milk consumption puts teens on the road to life-threatening adult diseases linked to dairy products, including heart disease, strokes, diabetes, certain cancers, and even osteoporosis—the very ailment dairy products are purported to prevent.

"The cruel treatment of veal calves and the link between milk and a host of illnesses in humans make the dairy industry’s case for drinking milk hard to swallow," says PETA education manager Jay Kelly. "Kind kids would spit out that slime if they knew what becomes of the calves whose milk is stolen by the dairy industry."

More information is available at MilkSucks.com