New PETA Billboard Sews Up the Case for Vegan Fashion
Anti-Speciesism Campaign Swings Into Town for the Fall/Winter Shopping Season
For Immediate Release:
October 13, 2020
Contact:
Megan Wiltsie 202-483-7382
PETA has just placed a billboard in the heart of the Garment District encouraging everyone to show respect to sensitive sheep, cows, and geese this winter by choosing animal-friendly fabrics and leaving wool, leather, and down on the racks.
The ad is part of PETA’s campaign challenging speciesism, the misguided belief that all other animal species are inferior to humans and that it’s therefore somehow acceptable to harm and exploit them and even take the fleece, skin, feathers, or fur off their backs—a human-supremacist notion that’s cut from the same cloth as other forms of prejudice.
“When it comes to feeling pain and fear and valuing their own lives, cows, sheep, and geese are just like you and me,” says PETA President Ingrid Newkirk. “PETA’s ads encourage everyone to reject speciesism by valuing animals for who they are as individuals—and keeping what belongs to them out of our closets.”
PETA and its affiliates have released dozens of videos revealing that workers hit, kick, and mutilate gentle sheep for their wool; burn, electroshock, beat, and slaughter cows for leather; and slit birds’ throats and plunge them into scalding-hot defeathering tanks for down. But vegan fashion is on the rise: Searches for “vegan fashion” have increased 119% since October 2018, and the vegan leather market in particular is expected to reach $45.41 billion by 2025.
PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to wear”—offers a vegan clothing shopping guide on its website.
The billboard is located on Eighth Avenue, just below W. 40th Street. PETA also plans to run other #EndSpeciesism ads in Seattle.
For more information, please visit PETA.org.
