Fresh from the tap, PETA style.

Every once in a while, someone will send me a link to something and say "Hey! You should blog about this!" and I usually never do. But then a reader named Jen sent me a link to an article. This link was so fantastic, I had to write something. I don't even know what I'm going to write yet, but my thoughts have been churning like butter in my head since I read the story, so we'll have to see what comes out.

First, the article. Go read it, I'll wait. For those of you who don't like to follow links, here's most of the text, excluding the actual letter sent to Ben & Jerry's. Keep in mind this is not from The Onion:

WATERBURY, Vt. -- People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals sent a letter to Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield, co-founders of Ben & Jerry's Homemade Inc., urging them to replace cow's milk they use in their ice cream products with human breast milk, according to a statement recently released by a PETA spokeswoman."PETA's request comes in the wake of news reports that a Swiss restaurant owner will begin purchasing breast milk from nursing mothers and substituting breast milk for 75 percent of the cow's milk in the food he serves," the statement says. PETA officials say a move to human breast milk would lessen the suffering of dairy cows and their babies on factory farms and benefit human health.

"The fact that human adults consume huge quantities of dairy products made from milk that was meant for a baby cow just doesn't make sense," says PETA Executive Vice President Tracy Reiman. "Everyone knows that 'the breast is best,' so Ben & Jerry's could do consumers and cows a big favor by making the switch to breast milk."

"We applaud PETA's novel approach to bringing attention to an issue, but we believe a mother's milk is best used for her child," said a spokesperson for Ben and Jerry's.

Ignoring the fact that the Swiss restaurant owner just traded 3/4 of his normal clientele for a few extra fetishists sitting down to dinner on Saturday night, I will go out on a limb here and give PETA the benefit of the doubt as to whether they are actually serious or not. It could just be a giant tongue-in-cheek publicity stunt, and if so, kudos to the wackos. Having read other articles about PETA, however, I'm not so sure.

Rather than giving you a rational, well-thought-out analysis of PETA's goals and ambitions and the questionable methods they use to achieve them, which you can view at my buddy Dave's blog here, I will instead give you a blow by blow account of my thought processes after I read the article:

Drinking breast milk instead of cow's milk? That's disgusting!

Well, maybe not.

You see what happened right there? I had a visceral, instantaneous reaction to the article that was immediately tempered by the fact that I'm a guy.

Because of that small genderific detail, my mind first went here:



But then I thought: Well, it's not like we'll be getting it straight from the tap or anything. Plus, we're talking massive quantities here -- roughly 520 gallons per cow per year. (Yes, of course I had that statistic in my head.) And cows have a buttload of nipples.

So my brain wandered over here for a bit:



However, I realized genetic engineering doesn't come cheap. Given that, I theorized that U.S. dairy farmers, being a cheap-ass lot, were almost guaranteed to go down this path instead:



At that point, I was almost sure it was a bad idea and that PETA had a squirrel loose in the attic.

Besides, PETA tells us that high volume, industrial dairy farmers are a bunch of greedy bastards and they like to give the cows growth hormone and antibiotics and all sorts of other horrible shit to maximize their milk production, so before you know it, you'd be in this territory:



And then I was back to "That's Disgusting!" -- and also a little sick to my stomach.

I don't even know if that's a man or a woman, but I found the picture when I was looking around on the net and decided that if I had to see it, then you all did too. So you're welcome.

I still don't know if PETA was kidding or serious, but I do know this -- If it ever happens, I am 100% positive that I will be more than happy to pour Mountain Dew on my cornflakes every morning for the rest of my life.

Thank you, PETA, for being you. Don't ever change, Baby. You're glorious.