PETA Billboard to Honor Cows Killed After Truck Crash

For Immediate Release:
February 25, 2021

Contact:
Megan Wiltsie 202-483-7382

In honor of the 18 cows who were shot dead after being severely injured when a truck carrying them overturned on I-94 on Monday, PETA plans to place a billboard near the crash site proclaiming, “See the Individual. Go Vegan.”

“Witnesses saw these cows lie on the roadside in pain and terror for over 10 hours before they were finally shot in the head,” says PETA Executive Vice President Tracy Reiman. “PETA’s ad encourages anyone disturbed by the thought of these animals’ prolonged, horrific deaths—or by the thought of their sisters’ fate under the slaughterhouse knife—to go vegan.”

The truck was apparently transporting Holstein cows, the breed most often used by the dairy industry, in which workers artificially inseminate cows (rape them by inserting an arm into the rectum and a metal rod into the vagina) and tear calves away from their loving mothers within a day of birth. They ship male calves off to be slaughtered for veal, while females endure the same fate as their mothers: repeated forced pregnancies until their bodies break down and they’re slaughtered for cheap meat.

PETA notes that were at least 89 crashes last year and there have been at least 12 crashes so far this year involving trucks carrying animals used for food. Each person who goes vegan saves the lives of nearly 200 cows, pigs, chickens, and other animals every year and helps prevent future epidemics and pandemics: Confining and killing animals for food has been linked to SARS, swine flu, bird flu, and COVID-19, and the meat industry has allowed slaughterhouse workers to face a nearly unchecked spread of the novel coronavirus.

PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to eat or abuse in any other way”—opposes speciesism, a human-supremacist worldview. For more information, please visit PETA.org or follow the group on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram.