Billboard to Pay Tribute to Pigs Killed in Truck Crash

PETA Memorial Will Encourage People to Help Keep Animals out of Transport Trucks by Going Vegan

For Immediate Release:
August 19, 2019

Contact:
Megan Wiltsie 202-483-7382

In honor of the dozens of pigs who died after the truck carrying them overturned on the Route 58 eastbound on-ramp to Godwin Boulevard on the morning of Friday, August 9, PETA plans to place a billboard nearby showing a pig’s face next to the words “I’m ME, Not MEAT. See the Individual. Go Vegan.“

Video footage shot by PETA staffers—who arrived on the scene shortly after the crash—shows frantic, trapped pigs screaming inside the overturned truck for hours in the heat before being forced onto another truck and taken to slaughter.

“An unknown number of pigs died in this wreck, and those who survived were left alive just long enough to haul them to the slaughterhouse,” says PETA Executive Vice President Tracy Reiman. “PETA’s billboard will remind people that the best way to prevent tragedies like this is to help keep smart, sensitive pigs off the road—and out of slaughterhouses—by going vegan.”

In today’s meat industry, mother pigs are squeezed into narrow metal stalls barely larger than their bodies and kept almost constantly pregnant or nursing. Pigs’ tails are chopped off, their teeth are cut with pliers, and males are castrated—all without any pain relief. At the slaughterhouse, they’re hung upside down—sometimes while still conscious—and bled to death.

In 2018 alone, there were more than 90 accidents involving trucks used to transport chickens, pigs, turkeys, and cows in the U.S. In 2019, PETA has already noted 60 crashes involving trucks carrying animals used for food.

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.

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