Chicken ‘Nugget’ Crash Prompts PETA to Call for a Memorial
For Immediate Release:
May 2, 2022
Contact:
Brooke Rossi 202-483-7382
This afternoon, PETA sent a letter to Yassmin Gramian, secretary of the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation, asking for her permission to erect a 5-foot-tall memorial along Route 309 near Lawn Avenue, where a truck transporting 40,000 pounds of chicken nuggets overturned Wednesday. It would make people realize that there was more to the accident than a food spill and remind passersby that each nugget represents an animal who endured a miserable life and a terrifying death.
“People don’t think about the ethics of eating, but behind every chicken nugget is a sensitive little bird with feelings of pain and fear like us all, whose life was lost for a fleeting taste,” says PETA President Ingrid Newkirk. “With this memorial, PETA would encourage everyone to go vegan and recognize this crash as the waste of life it was.”
PETA notes that chickens are among the most abused animals on the planet.
Most of the 9 billion chickens killed every year for food are kept in dark, filthy sheds, often with no access to the outdoors. They’re denied everything that’s natural and important to them, such as sunbathing, dust baths, and roosting. Although they feel pain and fear, just as dogs, cats, and humans do, they’re subjected to routine mutilations and trucked through all weather extremes, sometimes over hundreds of miles, without any food or water.
PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to eat”—opposes speciesism, a human-supremacist worldview. For more information on PETA’s investigative newsgathering and reporting, please visit PETA.org or follow the group on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram.
