‘A Burger Stops a Beating Heart,’ Proclaim New Bus Ads

PETA Campaign Pops Up During National Burger Month—and During a Pandemic That Originated in a Meat Market

For Immediate Release:
May 14, 2020

Contact:
Brooke Rossi 202-483-7382

It’s National Burger Month, so PETA has plastered local buses with ads that warn, “A Burger Stops a Beating Heart.”

PETA’s ads come as Pennsylvania reports the sixth-highest number of COVID-19 cases in the country. Like swine flu, bird flu, and SARS, COVID-19 has been linked to eating animals—and so have heart disease, diabetes, strokes, and cancer. Veggie burgers, however, spare gentle cows immense suffering: In today’s meat industry, cows spend their lives on filthy feedlots, are trucked in all weather extremes to slaughterhouses, and are strung up by one leg and their throats slit, sometimes while they’re still conscious.

“Now more than ever, we must all take responsibility by taking a good look at what, or who, is on our plate,” says PETA President Ingrid Newkirk. “A veggie burger never started a pandemic, and PETA is eager to help everyone keep their hearts and their communities healthy by going vegan.”

Among other efforts, PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to eat” and which opposes speciesism, a human-supremacist worldview—has protested slaughterhouses, launched a full-page newspaper ad campaign urging everyone to go vegan, and bought stock in slaughter companies to urge them to start producing exclusively vegan meats during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Resources on PETA’s website include vegan starter kits; a list of vegan-friendly restaurant chains, many of which are still offering takeout during the pandemic; and, for this year’s at-home National Burger Month, a list of some of the best store-bought vegan burger patties.

For more information, please visit PETA.org.