Anti-Wool Billboard Hits Columbus Just in Time for Fall Shopping Season

PETA Urges Chilly City to Stay Warm With Cozy Wool-Free Clothing

For Immediate Release:
October 3, 2017

Contact:
Megan Wiltsie 202-483-7382

Just in time for the fall shopping season, PETA has placed a billboard in a busy shopping hub of Columbus to remind everyone that wool belongs on sheep—not on humans. The billboard shows a shorn sheep, who has collapsed on the floor with a broken leg, next to the words “Beaten, Cut, Kicked, Killed. Sheep Suffer for Wool. Wear Vegan.”

PETA’s billboard is located at 2885 Gender Rd.

“This fall shopping season, PETA is calling on kind consumers to think about what wool represents, and that’s a gentle sheep who might have been kicked, cut open, or even skinned alive,” says PETA Executive Vice President Tracy Reiman. “The only surefire way to buy responsibly is to buy vegan.”

In the last three years, PETA (whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to wear”) has released seven exposés of 40 wool-producing facilities around the world, including in Argentina, Chile, and the U.S.—and each one has revealed that sheep in this industry are mutilated and abused, even for supposedly “sustainable” wool. A PETA exposé of the Australian wool industry led officials to charge six shearers with 70 counts of cruelty to animals, the first-ever charges anywhere in the world against wool-industry workers for abusing sheep. All six defendants pleaded guilty.

Shearers are often paid by volume, not by the hour, which encourages fast, violent work that can lead to gaping wounds on sheep’s bodies, which workers stitch closed—without giving the animals any painkillers. When the animals are no longer useful to the wool industry, they’re slaughtered.

For more information, please visit PETA.org.