Joan Jett’s New Ad Premiering During The Rachel Maddow Show Asks Viewers to Stand Up for ALL Females
For Immediate Release:
October 21, 2024
Contact:
Moira Colley 202-483-7382
With discussions raging over women’s rights, equal pay, abortion access, and other issues, music icon Joan Jett is encouraging people to think beyond their own species and stand in solidarity with all females—including the cows, hens, and other animals whose reproductive systems are used in animal-exploiting industries. In a powerful new PETA video narrated by Jett and airing during The Rachel Maddow Show on Monday, the rock legend and longtime vegan morphs into images of different human women and other animals, saying, “We are all sisters under the skin. End speciesism!”
“We are daughters, sisters, and mothers,” Jett says in the video. “And if any of us were forcibly bred or had our breast milk or eggs taken and sold or our children stolen from us to be experimented on, we’d all feel violated and angry and heartbroken.”
Females of other species feel pain and fear just as intensely as women do, yet they’re routinely exploited for human use. In the meat industry, mother pigs spend their entire adult lives confined to cramped metal crates—and a PETA exposé of a pig farm revealed that piglets slowly die just out of reach of their distraught mothers. In the dairy industry, cows are repeatedly forcibly inseminated (raped)—workers insert an arm into the cow’s rectum and a metal rod to deliver semen into her vagina—and their newborn calves are torn away from them within a day of birth. In the egg industry, hens are typically confined to no more than a square foot of space, parts of their beaks are cut off, and they’re shipped to slaughter once their bodies wear out.
“Ask yourself,” Jett says in conclusion. “Would I wish this fate on my mother? Or my sister? Or me?”
Jett is part of a growing list of celebrities—including actor Kate del Castillo and Wu-Tang Clan’s RZA—who have teamed up with PETA to create videos in which they morph into images of different animals to promote kindness to all. PETA recently named RZA’s video the group’s greatest ad of all time for its impact, creativity, and powerful message.
PETA—whose motto reads, “Animals are not ours to experiment on, eat, wear, use for entertainment, or abuse in any other way”—points out that Every Animal Is Someone and offers free Empathy Kits for people who need a lesson in kindness. For more information, please visit PETA.org or follow the group on X, Facebook, or Instagram.
