‘Has Your Meat Been Molested?’ Billboard Canceled

PETA’s Pro-Vegan Campaign Ad Won’t Run in the Wake of Teacher Sex-Abuse Scandals

For Immediate Release:
April 1, 2015

Contact:
Alexis Sadoti 202-483-7382

PETA has pulled its pending requests with outdoor advertisers to run a billboard in Detroit that shows a factory-farmed pig’s face along with the words “Has Your Meat Been Molested? Learn the Disturbing Truth at PETA.org” after it discovered that two Detroit teachers have been charged with sexual misconduct.

“We wanted people to know that shocking sexual abuse of animals raised and killed for food has been uncovered thanks to whistleblowers,” says PETA President Ingrid E. Newkirk. “PETA will pull the ad, but we still urge everyone to prevent animals from enduring pain and torment by going vegan.”

Sexual abuse in the meat industry is routine and rampant. PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to eat”—has documented that meat-industry workers molest animals, including a supervisor at a farm in Iowa that supplies Hormel who rammed a cane into a pig’s vagina and boasted that he had thrust gate rods into the anuses of pigs who frustrated him, a worker at Aviagen Turkeys in West Virginia who pinned a female turkey to the ground and mimicked raping her, and a worker at a Butterball slaughterhouse in Arkansas who inserted his finger into a turkey’s reproductive opening repeatedly, among other abuses.

Turkeys raised and killed for food have been genetically manipulated to grow so large that they can no longer breed naturally, so workers hang tom turkeys upside down to extract their semen forcibly. In the dairy industry, cows are restrained on what the farmers themselves call “rape racks” while insemination instruments are shoved into their vaginas.

For more information, please visit PETA.org.