Agri-Plastics, I have a question for you: Exactly how stupid do you think women are?
For Breast Cancer Awareness Month, the company is hawking pink calf hutches that they've dubbed "Hutches for Hope." My hope is that this is an ill-conceived joke.
Calf hutches are the cramped plastic crates that dairy farms shove baby cows into after they've torn them away from their mothers shortly after birth. It happens like this: Cows, like human women, produce milk after they give birth. The milk is specially formulated to meet the needs of their own infants. But to keep them producing milk continuously, dairy farms force them to endure a constant cycle of cruelty: artificial insemination, pregnancy, the birth of a calf and then devastating loss when their baby is torn away so that humans can consume the milk instead.
The male babies are useless to the dairy industry, so they're typically sold for veal or fattened up for beef. The females can be used to replace their worn-out mothers, so they're isolated in these hutches, fed milk replacers and forcibly impregnated much younger than they would naturally reproduce.
Separating mothers from their babies and denying them both their innate desire to suckle: That's what Agri-Plastics wants people to buy into. For breast cancer awareness, of course.
Um, everyone is already aware of breast cancer. We're also aware of "pinkwashing" and how to avoid companies that try to use breast cancer marketing to sell products _ especially when those products contribute to the disease, not the cure.
According to the American Cancer Society, a full one-third of all cancer deaths in the United States can be attributed to dietary factors. Numerous studies of diets around the globe have led researchers to conclude that consuming animal fats, especially those found in red meat and high-fat dairy "products," increases the risk of breast cancer.
Dr. T. Colin Campbell, professor emeritus of nutritional biochemistry at Cornell University and one of the world's foremost experts on nutrition, may have summed it up best: "(N)o chemical carcinogen is nearly so important in causing human cancer as animal protein."
So Agri-Plastics is selling products that are used to create one of the world's most notorious chemical carcinogens _ and coloring them pink. For the cure.
Even better (meaning, worse) is when companies guilty of pinkwashing partner with breast cancer charities that continue to waste money on ineffective, antiquated experiments on animals that after decades and billions of dollars have failed to produce a cure.
Richard Klausner, a former head of the National Cancer Institute, stated, "The history of cancer research has been a history of curing cancer in the mouse. We have cured mice of cancer for decades and it simply didn't work in humans." The NCI now uses human cancer cells, taken by biopsy during surgery, to perform first-stage testing for new anti-cancer drugs, sparing the 1 million mice previously used annually by the agency and giving us all a much better shot at combating cancer.
So the "Hutches for Hope" sales strategy probably went something like this: Persuade people to buy pink plastic crates that will be used to kidnap nursing babies from their mothers in order to make products that promote cancer in humans _ then we'll donate money to an organization that kills animals but doesn't do a bit of good toward finding a cure. They'll do it because the crates are pink!
I'm not sure which is more insulting _ the fact that this company is hawking carcinogens and cruelty for Breast Cancer Awareness Month or the fact that it doesn't think women are smart enough to see past the color pink.
