Protester’s Death Prompts Full-Page ‘Time to Move Away From Meat’ Ad
PETA Calls On Canadians to See All Animals as Individuals, Not Food
For Immediate Release:
June 27, 2020
Contact:
Brooke Rossi 202-483-7382
In memory of Regan Russell, a PETA member who was killed by a pig-transport truck last week during a peaceful protest outside a Burlington slaughterhouse, PETA has placed a full-page ad in Sunday’s Toronto Sun that shows a photo of a dying piglet on a factory farm and asks, “What did pigs ever do to deserve this?”
Russell’s death came just two days after Ontario lawmakers passed the highly controversial “ag-gag” law Bill 156, which makes it a crime merely to investigate cruelty to animals on farms, in slaughterhouses, and on transport trucks, where pigs may legally be trapped for up to 28 hours without food or water. They freeze to the sides of trucks in winter, they die of the heat in the mobile metal boxes in the summer, and year-round, they suffocate under the bodies of other pigs or die of heart attacks as they scream and try to escape. That isn’t all that they endure, but now it’s illegal to report their suffering.
“Each pig killed by the meat industry was a sensitive individual, one made of flesh and blood who felt pain and fear, just like you and me,” says PETA President Ingrid Newkirk. “PETA is offering free vegan starter kits, free vegan mentor services, and free tips to help people honor Regan Russell’s legacy of sticking up for pigs by going vegan.”
PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to eat” and which opposes speciesism, a human-supremacist worldview—notes that pigs who survive the grueling trip to the slaughterhouse are hung upside down by the legs and dismembered, sometimes while still conscious and able to feel pain.
In addition to sparing nearly 200 animals every year daily suffering and a terrifying death, each person who goes vegan reduces their risk of suffering from heart disease, cancer, strokes, high blood pressure, diabetes, and obesity and helps prevent future pandemics: SARS, bird flu, swine flu, and COVID-19 have all been linked to confining and killing animals for food.
For more information, please visit PETA.org.
