Billboard to Pay Tribute to Chickens Killed in Truck Crash

PETA Memorial Will Encourage People to Keep Animals out of Transport Trucks by Going Vegan

For Immediate Release:
January 23, 2020

Contact:
Nicole Meyer 202-483-7382

In honor of the chickens who were killed on January 17 when the truck carrying 6,000 of them to a live market for slaughter overturned at the 71 Freeway overpass near Grand Avenue, PETA plans to place a billboard by the crash site urging people to go vegan. Even though animal activists on the scene offered to arrange reputable sanctuary homes for the survivors, the U.S. Department of Agriculture stipulated that those who survived the crash would be killed.

“If these chickens weren’t killed on the highway, their throats would have been slit and their bodies chopped up for food,” says PETA Executive Vice President Tracy Reiman. “PETA’s ad encourages anyone who’s disturbed by the thought of animals suffering on the side of the road or under the slaughterhouse knife to go vegan.”

PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to eat”—opposes speciesism, which is the human-supremacist worldview that other species are nothing more than commodities. Chickens killed for their flesh are crammed by the tens of thousands into filthy sheds and bred to grow such unnaturally large upper bodies that their legs often become crippled under the weight. At the slaughterhouse, their throats are cut, often while they’re still conscious, and many are scalded to death in defeathering tanks. Every person who goes vegan saves the lives of nearly 200 animals each year.

PETA notes that there were more than 100 crashes in 2019 involving trucks carrying animals used for food—and there have already been 16 since the start of 2020.

For more information, please visit PETA.org.