Great White Warning Prompts Billboard: Humans Have ‘The Deadliest Jaws’!

PETA Will Alert Outer Banks Swimmers to the Real Predators in the Water

For Immediate Release:
May 16, 2019

Contact:
Audrey Shircliff 202-483-7382

In response to reports that a 2,137-pound great white shark is headed toward the coast, PETA plans to place a billboard that shows a gaping human mouth next to the words “The Deadliest Jaws? Yours. Go Vegan.”

“The real predators in the water are the humans who catch, kill, and consume trillions of marine animals every year,” says PETA President Ingrid Newkirk. “PETA’s billboard will encourage beachgoers to make the oceans a little safer for all living, feeling beings by keeping fish flesh and shark fins off their dining tables.”

PETA’s billboard points out that humans slaughter nearly 1 million sharks each year. Humans also consume more fish annually than all other animals combined, and the demand for shark-fin soup has resulted in overfishing and dwindling shark populations. Shark finning entails dragging the animals—who studies show have individual personalities—to the surface, hacking their fins off, and throwing them back into the ocean, leaving them to die slowly from their injuries, stress, or suffocation.

Most fish commonly served in restaurants and supermarkets are caught using huge, sometimes miles-long commercial-fishing nets that stretch across ocean floors, also trapping “trash catch” such as dolphins, turtles, and seals. When hauled up from the ocean, fish—who are highly sensitive to pain—are often crushed to death, and their eyeballs bulge out of their heads from the pressure change caused by suddenly surfacing. Others are gutted alive.

PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to eat”—opposes speciesism, which is a human-supremacist worldview. The group offers free vegan starter kits and encourages everyone to try healthy, humane vegan meals such as Gardein’s delicious Golden Fishless Filets.

For more information, please visit PETA.org.