PETA Attacks Slaughterhouse Openings With Full-Page Ad Appeal to New York Consumers

Americans Must Start Eating As if Everyone’s Life Depends on It, Because It Does: Meat Comes From Filthy Factory Farms Rife With Disease

For Immediate Release:
May 8, 2020

Contact:
David Perle 202-483-7382

As Gov. Andrew Cuomo releases details for the gradual reopening of parts of New York later this month—and because the state was confirmed as the “primary gateway” for COVID-19 cases across the U.S.—PETA will urge everyone to help stop future pandemics by running an ad in this Sunday’s edition of The New York Times proclaiming, “America: It’s Time to Move Away From Meat.”

The ad is part of a nationwide blitz running in major newspapers across the country and comes in response to President Trump’s backing for slaughterhouses to remain open or reopen, causing millions of animals to be killed, and even as workers suffer from COVID-19. It makes the point that U.S. factory farms and slaughterhouses are as filthy as China’s “wet markets,” their floors covered with blood, urine, feces, and offal—and that a meat shortage doesn’t mean a food shortage, because no one needs to eat meat. Consuming it is linked to heart disease, cancer, strokes, high blood pressure, diabetes, and obesity. The ad urges, “Eat As if Everyone’s Life Depends on It, Because It Does.”

“So many people feel powerless in the face of this health crisis, but everyone still has control over what, or who, is on their plates,” says PETA President Ingrid Newkirk. “PETA stands ready with free starter kits, free vegan mentor services, and free tips to help people stay healthy and try to prevent the next pandemic.”

The novel coronavirus originated in a Chinese market where live and dead animals were sold for human consumption, swine flu began on a U.S. factory farm, and other influenza viruses have been traced to chickens. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warns that approximately 75% of recently emerged infectious diseases affecting humans originated in other animals.

The ad shows a cow mired in filth on a dairy farm—an industry that takes calves away from their mothers, slaughters the males for veal, and uses the females as milk machines until their bodies give out, after which they are killed.

PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to eat” and which opposes speciesism, a human-supremacist worldview—is also running similar ads in this Sunday’s editions of the Los Angeles Times, The San Diego Union-Tribune, and The Seattle Times. They have already run in The Washington Post and The Hill, and one will appear in the Washington Examiner next week.

Resources on PETA’s website include vegan starter kits and a list of vegan-friendly restaurant chains, many of which are still offering takeout during the pandemic. For more information, please visit PETA.org.