PETA Billboard to Honor Cows Killed in Truck Crash

For Immediate Release:
June 28, 2021

Contact:
Brooke Rossi 202-483-7382

To memorialize the cows who were injured and killed when a truck carrying them overturned near the West Huntington exit on I-64 on Thursday, June 24, PETA plans to place a billboard near the crash site proclaiming, “See the Individual. Go Vegan.” Shell-shocked cows who survived the crash were reportedly roaming the interstate and recaptured in areas as far away as Chesapeake, Ohio.

“Cows died in terror and agony as a result of this crash, and the traumatized survivors were rounded up and likely hauled off for their throats to be slit and their bodies carved up for food,” says PETA Executive Vice President Tracy Reiman. “PETA’s ad encourages anyone disturbed by the thought of animals suffering on the roadside or under the slaughterhouse knife to go vegan.”

Cows in the meat industry are often confined to cramped, filthy feedlots without protection from the elements. At the slaughterhouse, workers shoot them in the head with a captive-bolt gun, hang them up by one leg, and cut their throat—often while they’re still conscious.

PETA notes that there have been at least 40 crashes involving trucks carrying animals used for food so far this year and that there were at least 89 last year. 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 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”—opposes speciesism, a human-supremacist worldview. For more information, please visit PETA.org or follow the group on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram.