‘Devils’ to Descend on Mountaire Chicken Slaughterhouse
PETA Will Call On Company With Christian Values to Stop Killing Animals and Exposing Workers to COVID-19
For Immediate Release:
August 11, 2020
Contact:
Nicole Meyer 202-483-7382
Armed with pitchforks and signs proclaiming, “Stop Killing or Burn in Hell,” PETA “devils” will protest outside a Mountaire Farms slaughterhouse on Wednesday. The chicken-slaughter company’s creed is “[t]o be good stewards of all of the assets that God has entrusted to us,” and its owner set up his own Jesus Fund, yet it’s forcing workers to kill up to 175 chickens a minute—not giving them time to check them for disease as they whiz down the hanging line—even as reports on the meat industry show that 20% or more of slaughterhouse workers nationwide have tested positive for COVID-19.
When: Wednesday, August 12, 12 noon
Where: Mountaire Farms slaughterhouse, 29101 John J. Williams Hwy., Millsboro
PETA members will also give away free vegan chicken sandwiches and packages of frozen Gardein “chicken” to workers in honor of activist Shimon Shuchat, who passed away on July 28.
“Slaughterhouses are hell on Earth for animals and workers: One is treated as a commodity and the other as dispensable rather than both being seen as part of Creation,” says PETA President Ingrid Newkirk. “As COVID-19 spreads like wildfire and our society finally recognizes these gentle birds’ suffering, PETA is calling on Mountaire to practice mercy by shutting down its slaughterhouses.”
Confining and killing animals for food has been linked to SARS, swine flu, bird flu, and COVID-19, and a new strain of swine flu with “pandemic potential” has been spreading from pigs to humans in China. In U.S. slaughterhouses, workers stand shoulder to shoulder and slit animals’ throats above blood-soaked floors, with line speeds so fast that animals end up thrashing around and injuring them—conditions that allow COVID-19 to spread.
PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to eat”—opposes speciesism, which is a human-supremacist worldview. For more information, please visit PETA.org.
