Chicago Shootings Prompt ‘Peace in Our Dinnertime’ Billboard

PETA Ad Suggests Nonviolence Can Begin on Our Plates

For Immediate Release:
September 19, 2016

Contact:
David Perle 202-483-7382

Everyone can do something in response to the news that Chicago just surpassed 3,000 shootings and 500 homicides this year—with at least 36 more people shot just this weekend, some fatally—so PETA is negotiating with outdoor advertisers in the city to place a billboard with a plea for an ethic of all-encompassing nonviolence. The ad shows a fist holding carrots next to the words “Peace in Our Dinnertime” and “Choose Vegan,” and PETA hopes to place it in communities that are enduring the most violence, including the West Side’s Austin, Harrison, and Ogden districts and the East Side’s Englewood district. PETA believes that the root cause of all violence and disrespect is a failure to relate to and show compassion for those the perpetrators see as “others,” and the group strives to awaken people to the need to renounce oppression in all its forms.

“Perhaps nothing is more important than being decent to all living beings—regardless of race, religion, or species—and if we can relate to the animals killed for our plates, it shouldn’t be so hard to relate to our fellow human beings,” says PETA President Ingrid Newkirk. “People often feel powerless to stop needless violence around them, yet everyone has the chance to practice peace and compassion by going vegan.”

PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to eat”—notes that all animals experience joy, pain, fear, love, and grief and value their lives just as humans do. But in the meat industry, chickens’ and turkeys’ throats are cut while they’re still conscious, piglets’ tails and testicles are cut off without the use of painkillers, cows are hung upside down and often skinned while they’re still able to feel pain, and calves in the dairy industry are taken from their mothers within hours of birth. On the decks of fishing boats, fish suffocate or are cut open while they’re still alive.

For more information, please visit PETA.org.