PETA Spotlight: Dolores Huerta and Other Female Icons You Never Knew Were Veg!

For Immediate Release:
March 2, 2021

Contact:
Nicole Meyer 202-483-7382

In honor of Women’s History Month (March), PETA (an organization founded by a woman and led by women) has chosen local icon Dolores Huerta as one of five female trailblazers to celebrate—and the millions who look up to these women as role models may be surprised to learn that their work for social justice includes animal protection.

A groundbreaking labor activist renowned for her fight to overhaul food production systems and protect agricultural workers, Huerta has continued her work through the Dolores Huerta Foundation, which encompasses her advocacy for women’s rights, LGBTQ rights, immigrant rights, civil rights, and other causes. As she has said, “[E]very moment is an organizing opportunity, every person a potential activist, every minute a chance to change the world”—and she put those words into action by keeping animals off the table.

“Kicking meat to the curb is the right move for anyone who cares about labor rights, food justice, or the plight of others—whether we have fur, fins, feathers, or hair,” says PETA President Ingrid Newkirk. “PETA encourages everyone to join Dolores Huerta and her fellow visionaries in showing solidarity across species lines and condemning the subjugation of any living being.”

PETA notes that sexual exploitation is rampant in the meat, egg, and dairy industries, where female cows are artificially inseminated (raped by inserting an arm into the rectum and a metal rod into the vagina), hens are shipped to slaughter once their bodies wear out, and mother pigs spend their entire adult lives confined to cramped metal crates. Slaughterhouses are also a nightmare for workers—many of them immigrants—who face some of the most dangerous working conditions in America, including a nearly unchecked spread of COVID-19.

PETA’s other honorees are educator and prison reform advocate Angela Davis, racial justice leader Coretta Scott King, Hollywood trailblazer Cicely Tyson, and feminist icon Gloria Steinem—all vegetarians or vegans.

PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to eat”—opposes speciesism, the human-supremacist worldview that justifies violence against other animals. For more information, please visit PETA.org or follow the group on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram.