New PETA Billboards Proclaim, ‘Meat Is Murder!’

COVID-19 Came From a Meat Market; Everyone Urged to Stop All the Needless Deaths

For Immediate Release:
September 15, 2020

Contact:
Megan Wiltsie 202-483-7382

“End the Violence. Go Vegan.” That’s the message on two new PETA billboards that just went up to remind everyone that the meat industry kills billions of sensitive animals every year—and that confining and killing animals for food comes back to bite us: It has led to swine flu, bird flu, SARS, and now COVID-19, which has been sweeping through slaughterhouses, sickening and killing hundreds of workers and their families.

“For every chicken cutlet or pork chop, a living being experienced a terrifying death in a slaughterhouse, where workers risk catching deadly diseases,” says PETA President Ingrid Newkirk. “PETA’s message is that the best meal is one that nobody had to die for—we can eat delicious vegan food and let everyone live.”

Animals used for food experience joy, pain, fear, love, and grief and value their lives, just as humans do. But in today’s meat and dairy industries, cows are forcibly separated from their beloved calves, chickens’ throats are cut while they’re still conscious, piglets are castrated without painkillers, and fish are cut open while they’re still alive. Every person who goes vegan saves the lives of nearly 200 animals each year.

PETA’s billboards are located at 1504 E. Main Ave., in the Farm & Home Supply parking lot, and at 625 S. Washington St., next to Runnings.

PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to eat”—opposes speciesism, which is a human-supremacist worldview that fosters violence toward other animals. For more information, please visit PETA.org.