Viral Great White Shark Video Spawns ‘Deadliest Jaws? Yours’ PETA Ad
Ahead of ‘Shark Week,’ PETA Billboard to Alert Swimmers to the Real Predators in the Water
For Immediate Release:
July 23, 2019
Contact:
David Perle 202-483-7382
In response to a viral video showing a great white shark leaping out of the water to snatch a fish off a boy’s line—and with the fearmongering TV event Shark Week right around the corner—PETA plans to place a billboard in Cape Cod showing a gaping human mouth next to the words “The Deadliest Jaws? Yours. Go Vegan.”
“The biggest predators in the water aren’t sharks—they’re the humans who catch, kill, and consume trillions of marine animals every year, compared to the three or four humans sharks kill each year,” says PETA President Ingrid Newkirk. “PETA’s billboard will remind beachgoers to make the oceans a little safer for all living beings by staying away from the seafood buffet.”
PETA’s billboard points out that humans slaughter nearly 100 million sharks each year. Humans also consume more fish annually than all other animals combined, and the demand for shark-fin soup has resulted in overfishing and dwindling shark populations. Shark finning entails dragging the animals—who studies show have individual personalities—to the surface, hacking their fins off, and throwing them back into the ocean, leaving them to die slowly from their injuries, stress, or suffocation.
Most fish commonly served in restaurants and supermarkets are caught using huge, sometimes miles-long commercial-fishing nets that stretch across ocean floors and also trap “trash catch” such as dolphins, turtles, and seals. When hauled up from the ocean, fish—who are highly sensitive to pain—are often crushed to death, and their eyeballs bulge out of their heads from the pressure change caused by suddenly surfacing. Others are gutted alive.
PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to eat”—opposes speciesism, which is a human-supremacist worldview. The group offers free vegan starter kits and encourages everyone to try healthy, humane vegan meals such as Gardein’s delicious Golden Fishless Filets.
For more information, please visit PETA.org.
