Hey, State Fair, ‘I’m ME, Not MEAT!’ Proclaims Pro-Vegan Ad Blitz

PETA’s Provocative Bus and Bus Shelter Ads Plead With Des Moines Fairgoers to See Animals as Individuals and Go Vegan

For Immediate Release:
August 10, 2017

Contact:
Megan Wiltsie 202-483-7382

Just in time for the Iowa State Fair (today through August 20), PETA is serving up some food for thought in Des Moines, the capital of the country’s top pork-producing state, courtesy of ads on buses and bus shelters promoting the idea that animals are much more than the sum of their parts. The ads, which appear throughout the city, show a pig’s face next to the words “I’m ME, Not MEAT. See the Individual. Go Vegan.”

“Just like humans, pigs are made of flesh and blood, feel pain and fear, have unique personalities, and value their own lives,” says PETA Executive Vice President Tracy Reiman. “PETA’s new ad campaign encourages everyone to empathize with animals by choosing fakin’ bacon and other delicious vegan dishes.”

PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to eat”—notes that in the industrialized meat industry, mother pigs are squeezed into narrow metal stalls barely larger than their bodies and kept almost constantly pregnant or nursing. Pigs’ tails are chopped off, their teeth are cut with pliers, and males are castrated—all without any painkillers. At slaughterhouses, they’re hung upside down and bled to death, often while still conscious.

Since 2012, Iowa’s “ag-gag” law has criminalized exposing cruelty to animals in the meat industry. Before that law was passed, a PETA eyewitness exposé of an Iowa Hormel supplier caught workers beating pigs with metal rods, jabbing clothespins into their eyes, and even sexually assaulting a pig with a cane. Local law-enforcement officials used PETA’s video evidence to file 22 charges of neglect and abuse, leading to Iowa’s first convictions for the abuse or neglect of factory-farmed pigs.

For more information, please visit PETA.org.