as always, my empathy for vegetarians is consumed by the self-righteousness of much of their propaganda. the fact that this loopy cow is associated with this campaign makes me immediately 'file' it under 'crazy twaddle'.

my real point, though, is that cattle isn't destroying the earth, overpopulation is. plain and simple. if there were only, say, 500 million people living on this planet, it's a fair guess to say we could produce a 100 tonnes of CO2 per capita a year and be nowhere near the enviro-danger (i'm trademarking that phrase, btw) we're in now. it's all about scale, yunnow?

Give Fat Tony the contract to supply the milk.

Hypocritical cow, sitting in a gas guzzler while asking me to give up meat. Pass the bacon sarnies

There was just a re-run of the episode where Homer becomes bodyguard to Mayor Quimby, so they bust the Mafia's rat milk factory...

Doesn't mean they actually exist!

Just like Price Feckin Charles. Wins an award for being green, flies to New York to collect it (occupying the entire business and first class section of a jumbo with his entourage).

XFM radio in London had some great ideas this morning about how to get the milk out of the rats. They agreed that attaching little milking machines to them was probably impractical, so they suggested freezing the rats, then smashing them with a hammer to reveal a little frozen milk nodule (for want of a better term).

I'm really looking forward to all the Reg readers' alternative techniques...

Save the world, eat vegetarians.

This could be good news... it might mean that they're making a new series of Brasseye and this is a Chris Morris wind up.

has she never heard of the phrase "dignified silence"?

Red Dwarf Series One

Holly said..."Dog's milk lasts longer than any other kind of milk"

Lister... "Why's that?"

Holly ... "Because no bugger will drink it"

Case rested and off to the cloak room...

'cos of course she's, like, tried it and found it gooood, hasn't she. No?

Chalk up another entry in the Vegan=Loony list.

Why bother to take the piss when they're so bloody good at doing it themselves? Choosing Lady Teapot as your spokesthing is hardly the act of a sane group for a start.

When asked how exactly one milks rats, Miss Mills responded that she usually took them to court and attempted to fleece them for eveything they were worth.

Flesh tastes good. Overpopulation wrecks the environment.

Solution: cannibalism.

I wonder whether Heather's leg comes with a rotisserie adaptor?

John

...it's made of wood.

All those damn vegans are eating to few calories to feul their brains, so how will it take for natural selection to rid us all of their damn BS?

but she just hasn't thought it through.

There's a much better supply source, and it will provide a welcome incentive for moms to stay home with their kids at the same time.

Human breast milk.

(Gotta go - plane to catch)

If everyone got their milk from one or more of the other 25 alternatives to cows, surely we'd need far more fo those animals.

This calls for a graph of environmental damage per litre of milk for each animal type.

Can El Reg cease reporting this ridiculous woman's babbling and return to reporting on Paris Hilton, to restore the intellectual level here.

I'm a vegetarian. And although I miss some aspects of eating meat (more texture than taste - it's hard to find stuff to actually chew when you're a veggie) I know that I won't go back to eating meat. But I just couldn't give up milk. All these '25 alternatives' taste horrific and soy/rice milk just doesn't have the viscosity (sp?) of even semi skimmed. On top of that, for me, the universe would lose all purpose without cheese.

<sarcasm>Additionally I'm really pleased that organisations like Viva can hire nutters to help the world see that all of us vegetarians are grass munching, tree hugging, eco warriors with a penchant for telling ather people what to eat.</sarcasm>

...has broken his dignified silence to comment that he thinks that Heather maybe 'unbalanced'

He goes on to say sliding a couple of beermats under her left foot usually helps

IF YOU LAUGHED AT THAT THEN SHAME ON YOU - YOU ARE A WICKED, WICKED PERSON!

I think her latest publicist watched the same Simpsons episode as JP and is pulling her leg - DOH! THAT PUN WAS NOT INTENTIONAL - STOP GIGGLING AT THE BACK!

Wasn't there a story a while ago about a bunch of vegan's who inflicted their insane diet on their newborn? And got convicted after it died of malnutrition? So I've gotta ask; how long will it take natural selection to rid the world of all of these idiots?

Side note: that woman who heads PETA had herself sterilised right? Sounds like a good candidate for a Darwin Award - helping to keep our gene pool clean.

so we can all go on eating meat and ignore that stupid UN report!

Perv voice; "Lovely. Milky, milky."

/rant

Danger! Terrorism/global warming (delete as appropriate) is going to kill us all unless you give up civil liberties the way the government wants you to, eat the way the crazy vegans want you to, work/travel/live the way the anti-capitalists want you to...

F*** off! My new sports coupe pollutes nothing like all the crap packaging encasing everything I buy, or the dirty low-grade diesel running the freight liners, or the socially and environmentally irresponsible practices indulged in to dispose of unwanted company waste, or all the other ridiculous crap produced by mad bureaucracies the world over. Never mind me changing my lifestyle - you're all so fond of referring to me as a 'consumer', yet the stuff I consume is provided by same governments and corporations - get your own house in order!

/end rant

... based on her current success with milking a Beatle.

Surely this proves that she is indeed a fantasist?

Anyway, if she wants to be that eco friendly, why doesn't she get rid of her plane?

Just use Immac on the other leg.

Coat GET!

Laugh?! I nearly fell off my chair!

(Only afterwards did I reach the next line - that's not fair!)

... is the fact that if we all gave up meat and ate the vegetation ourselves then ... we would simply all be gasbags ourselves and still produce the methane ! <paarp>

Milking rats is going to be no different to milking a cow from a vegetarians point of view. I personally don't want to see rat farms (I'm sure they already exist)

I'll rather stick with Soya Milk.

Also - what was the IT angle on this one?

think it through mate. Animals eat plant food and produce more food than they've eaten? I was told 7lbs of veggie protein = 1lb of meat protein (though that was by some crazy vegetarian organisation, so.....). Sounds like you've got some magic animals there......

And carnivores can't survive on vegetable matter, that's why I'm dead! Are you sure you're not an omnivore.....

I eat meat, so we can kill some cow and remove it from the planet, so it stops polluting.

Re: overpopulation. I believe that Mr Jonathan Swift has a modest proposal to solve this particular problem.

wot, and end up like her? I think not! flippin' crackpot.

My ferret milk factory works perfectly well thank you.

You're going to need very small hands indeed, to milk a rat.

I agree entirely with Alan Parsons, these lunatics are giving normal vegetarians a bad name with their dogmatic scaremongering. Some of us just don't eat meat because we don't want to, and couldn't care less about what anyone else shoves in their gob.

Karl Lattimer though, in reference to their not being enough land mass to support the human race through vegetables/cereals/pulses/whatever, what do you think the animals eat in the first place? Do they magically produce more nutrition than they take in?

Don't worry though, hippies piss me off too.

...milk humans? I mean look at it, all those unemployed chavettes are permapregnant anyway, so why not solve two problems in one go?

Jokes aside, I am completely with the comments stating overpopulation as the true problem. We're omnivores, and we're for the most part top of the food chain and the dominant species at this time because of that. There's simply too many of us. Bring in the meteor.

What's worse than greenhouse gasses? People unable to drink because their livestock are using up all the available drinking water.

In an article in New Scientist magazine, a study points out that to make your average burger takes up 11,000 litres of water.

More details:

http://environment.newscientist.com/channel/earth/mg18925401.500-earth-the-parched-planet.html

You get milk from nursing animals right?

Therefore to get rats/dogs/rabbits milk the rat/dog/rabbit has just had to have given birth right?

So what are we going to do with the massive population explosion of rats, dogs, rabbits etc?

Kill them at birth? Read the book, seen the film, now eat the stew?

Look like the food faddies haven't thought this one through properly. But since when did that stop any sort of fanatic?

Bloody idiots.

Classic indeed! I'm not sure it's quite so straightforward though, aren't farm animals fed on a number of foodstuffs? (except for anchor cows obviously).

I don't know, I tend to avoid veggie/meat eater arguments but there seemed to be such a lot of postings from meat eaters I thought I better chime in.

ooh, just been poking around wikipedia (yeah, I know, but sources are listed) and found this:

"According to the USDA (united states department of agriculture), growing crops for farm animals requires nearly half of the U.S. water supply and 80% of its agricultural land."

So maybe we could grow something other than grass on that 80%?