Meatpackers Could Become Flower Arrangers With Free Training From PETA

PETA Is Offering Slaughterhouse Staff Who Walked Off the Job Over Coronavirus a Chance to Reinvent Themselves in a Nonviolent Profession

For Immediate Release:
April 3, 2020

Contact:
Megan Wiltsie 202-483-7382

After several Greeley meatpacking plant employees reportedly tested positive for COVID-19—prompting hundreds more to call off work—PETA sent a letter today offering to cover the cost of job training for them in the pleasant, nonviolent field of flower arrangement.

“Working on the kill floor is a dangerous, dirty, dead-end job,” says PETA President Ingrid Newkirk. “PETA is happy to help budding flower arrangers flee the meat industry for the sake of animals and their own mental health.”

PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to eat” and which opposes speciesism, a human-supremacist worldview—notes that filthy animal markets and slaughterhouses covered with blood and waste are perfect breeding grounds for influenza viruses and other pathogens that cross the species barrier.

For more information, please visit PETA.org.

PETA’s letter to Kim Cordova, president of the United Food and Commercial Workers Local 7, follows.

April 3, 2020

Kim Cordova

President

United Food and Commercial Workers Local 7

Dear Ms. Cordova,

I’m writing on behalf of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) and our more than 6.5 million members and supporters worldwide with an offer that we hope your members will like. We will cover the cost of retraining the Greeley meat-packing plant workers who called off from work earlier this week because of concerns over COVID-19. In fact, we’ll extend this offer to any workers who will abandon their jobs in one of the country’s most dangerous occupations: dismembering the bodies of animals on the kill floor. We’re offering to retrain them in a healthy, 100% animal-friendly trade: flower arrangement.

As you know, many people refuse to face the facts about the beef industry, such as that cattle are trucked off to slaughter at a fraction of their natural life expectancy, that they frequently collapse during the frightening ride to the slaughterhouse and are then prodded or dragged off the trucks as their weary legs give out, and that, kicking and screaming, they are strung up so that their throats can be slit, some while they’re still conscious. The bloody, gruesome process of slaughtering, cutting up, and packaging the corpses of these once-sentient individuals involves constant cruelty to animals and can lead those who inflict it to suffer from mental and physical health problems.

Filthy factory farms and meat markets threaten the health of everyone—not just workers and consumers of meat products—by providing a breeding ground for deadly diseases such as bird flu, swine flu, SARS, COVID-19, and more. Now, while the world is battling the current pandemic—which originated in a meat market—is the time for everyone to realize that meat is not only nonessential but also a huge threat to human health.

So we’d be happy to provide job training for any of your members who would like to reject violence and respect life. Thank you for your consideration. I look forward to hearing from you.

Very truly yours,

Ingrid E. Newkirk

President