Provocative PETA Billboard Challenges Whole Foods’ ‘Humane Meat’ Myth

Using Shocking Findings at Whole Foods Supplier, Image Shows Dead Pigs Littering Picturesque Landscape

For Immediate Release:
December 1, 2015

Contact:
Sophia Charchuk 202-483-7382

A new billboard featuring artwork that depicts slaughtered pigs lying in an idyllic pasture will now greet Arizona motorists driving to their local Whole Foods store. The billboard—which reads, “Humane: Sounds Nice, but It’s Still Murder”—comes on the heels of a recent video investigation that found that pigs were severely crowded, miserably confined, and left to languish with injuries and illnesses for weeks before being shipped to slaughter by a Pennsylvania-based Whole Foods supplier of “humanely raised” meat. The billboard is located at 4411 E. Speedway Blvd. PETA has plans to place the billboard in other cities across the country.

“Kind-hearted shoppers are being hoodwinked by meat and dairy foods that are marked ‘humane,’ but the horrifying conditions on this Pennsylvania farm show that there’s simply no such thing as ‘humane meat,’” says PETA Executive Vice President Tracy Reiman. “As long as profits are involved, animals will suffer.”

PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to eat … or abuse in any other way”—exposed multiple discrepancies between Whole Foods’ “5-Step™” animal-care standards and the daily reality for pigs at Sweet Stem Farm, LLC, in Pennsylvania. Some pigs were given only about 5 square feet of space on a concrete floor, and none of them had access to the farm’s lush green grass. Pigs were left to suffer from fever, lameness, bleeding rectal prolapses, and other conditions for weeks without being examined or treated by a veterinarian, to the eyewitness’s knowledge.

In addition, although Whole Foods claims, “Our Meat: No Antibiotics, Ever,” many pigs who were given antibiotics were sent to a slaughterhouse that supplies the supermarket chain. PETA also recently learned that federal inspectors documented violations of more than 24 meat-inspection regulations in approximately 16 months at the slaughterhouse, including pigs so severely disabled that they were unable to move even a few feet to reach drinking water.

For more information, please visit PETA.org.