PETA Billboard to Honor Cows Killed in Truck Crash

Memorial Will Encourage People to Help Keep Animals out of Transport Vehicles by Going Vegan

For Immediate Release:
November 18, 2020

Contact:
Nicole Meyer 202-483-7382

In honor of the five cows who were killed when a truck carrying them overturned on I-81 on Friday, PETA plans to place a billboard near the crash site proclaiming, “See the Individual. Go Vegan.“

“These gentle cows endured a terrifying death on the highway, and those who survived were presumably taken to slaughter,” says PETA Executive Vice President Tracy Reiman. “PETA’s ad encourages anyone disturbed by the thought of animals suffering on the side of the road or facing the slaughterhouse knife to go vegan.”

The truck was 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 there have been at least 71 crashes 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 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, which is a human-supremacist worldview. For more information, please visit PETA.org or follow the group on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram.