Billboard Will Be Tribute to Cows Killed in Truck Crash

PETA Memorial Will Encourage Motorists to Go Vegan and Spare Animals Suffering

For Immediate Release:
October 19, 2017

Contact:
Audrey Shircliff 202-483-7382

In honor of the cows who suffered and died in a truck crash on Interstate 90 just east of Mitchell on October 14, PETA is planning to place a billboard near the site of the animals’ deaths, between exits 335 and 344. The billboard will show a cow’s face next to the words “I’m ME, Not MEAT. See the Individual. Go Vegan.”

“Many gentle cows died or were injured after a semi rolled over into the median, and those who survived the terrifying crash were likely granted no reprieve from the slaughterhouse blade,” says PETA Executive Vice President Tracy Reiman. “PETA’s billboard urges motorists to prevent such 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 trucks bound for slaughterhouses, they spend their short lives in cramped, filthy feedlots without protection from extreme temperatures. Calves are torn away from their mothers within hours of birth and are castrated and branded without painkillers. At the slaughterhouse, workers shoot cows in the head with a captive-bolt gun, hang them up by one leg, and cut their throats—often while they’re still conscious.

Two days before the crash near Mitchell, another truck carrying cows crashed outside Yankton, killing six. The two crashes continue a string of violent incidents in the area involving farmed animals: In September, a truck carrying pigs crashed on the same stretch of I-90 between Sioux Falls and Mitchell, killing and injuring an unknown number of pigs. In July, PETA called for a criminal investigation of Cimpl’s, a Yankton slaughterhouse whose staff repeatedly shot four bulls in the head.

For more information, please visit PETA.org.