Truck Fire Prompts Cow Billboard: ‘I’m ME, Not MEAT’

PETA’s Tribute Will Encourage Commuters to Go Vegan and Spare Animals Suffering

For Immediate Release:
July 20, 2017

Contact:
Megan Wiltsie 202-483-7382

In honor of the cows who died in a tractor trailer fire on Route 283 just outside Harrisburg on Saturday, PETA is planning to place a billboard near the site of the animals’ deaths, between the Vine Street and Union Street exits. The billboard will show a cow’s face next to the words, “I’m ME, Not MEAT. See the Individual. Go Vegan.”

“Sensitive, intelligent cows died in smoke and flames on Route 283 last weekend, and those who survived the terror presumably ended up under the slaughterhouse knife,” says PETA Executive Vice President Tracy Reiman. “PETA’s billboard urges motorists to prevent these needless deaths by keeping cows and all other animals off their plates.”

PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to eat”—notes that before cows are loaded onto slaughterhouse-bound trucks, they typically spend their short lives in cramped, filthy feedlots without protection from extreme temperatures. Calves are torn from their mothers within hours of birth and are castrated and branded without painkillers. At the slaughterhouse, workers shoot the animals in the head with a captive-bolt gun, hang them up by one leg, cut their throats, and skin them—often while they’re still conscious.

For more information, please visit PETA.org.