PETA Finally Secures Billboard to Mark Barn Blaze Hen Deaths
For Immediate Release:
April 14, 2021
Contact:
Megan Wiltsie 202-483-7382
PETA has just erected a billboard near the main office of Hickman’s Family Farms in memory of the more than 165,000 birds who were killed last month in a fire at a facility owned by the company. The billboard urges anyone upset by the animals’ suffering to take personal responsibility by no longer buying eggs and by going vegan.
“Every hen who died in that fire was a thinking, feeling individual who found themselves crammed into a filthy shed and exploited,” says PETA Executive Vice President Tracy Reiman. “If PETA’s billboard encourages just one person to break their egg habit, we’ll have done something good for some hens and for that human.”
Eggs are cholesterol bombs that contribute to health problems, including heart disease and high blood pressure.
Hens used for egg production are confined to cramped barns, where each bird has no more than a square foot of space. Few farms bother to go to the trouble or expense of installing smoke detectors or fire-suppression systems, as they consider the lives of the birds to have such little value. When hens’ bodies wear out and they’re no longer considered profitable, egg producers stuff them into metal boxes and crudely gas them with carbon dioxide, which is distressing and painful—or send them to slaughterhouses, where workers cut their throats, often while they’re still conscious, and scald many to death in defeathering tanks.
PETA notes that going vegan spares animals immense suffering and helps prevent future epidemics and pandemics. SARS, swine flu, bird flu, and COVID-19 all stemmed from confining and killing animals for food.
PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to eat”—opposes speciesism, the human-supremacist worldview that other species are nothing more than commodities. For more information, please visit PETA.org or follow the group on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram.
PETA’s billboard is located on MC 85 between S. 223rd and S. 221st avenues.
