Shore Transit Axes All Paid Ads to Avoid Running Pro-Vegan Pleas

Revenue-Slashing Decision Follows PETA Legal Victory

For Immediate Release:
September 15, 2022

Contact:
Nicole Meyer 202-483-7382

Following a recent court ruling establishing that Shore Transit could not selectively sell ad space on buses by refusing to run ads from PETA but accepting others, the agency has taken the extreme step of ending all paid advertising on its buses—a move that will also eliminate its ad revenue.

Just-released published Shore Transit board meeting minutes reveal that following PETA’s legal win, the advertising company will only run internal and government public service messages on its buses. The move comes after PETA’s attempts to run pro-vegan ads on its buses back in May 2020 and July 2021. In light of the new advertising guidelines, PETA is now dismissing the lawsuit against Tri-County Council of the Lower Eastern Shore of Maryland and its Shore Transit division.

“The Eastern Shore is awash in chicken sheds and processing plants, and Shore Transit would rather shoot itself in the foot than run the honest message that no one needs to kill in order to eat and that slaughterhouses spread disease,” says PETA Foundation Director of Litigation Asher Smith. “If agencies want to remain beholden to local animal exploiters rather than run PETA’s ads, they’re going to pay the price in lost revenue for refusing to talk about healthy and humane eating.”

Each person who goes vegan spares nearly 200 animals every year a terrifying death and helps prevent pandemics. The National Academy of Sciences has also found that slaughterhouses pose “a particular public health risk extending far beyond meatpacking companies and their employees.” The contribution of slaughterhouses to human deaths and the many of COVID-19 infections on the Eastern Shore has been confirmed by Maryland health officials.

PETA was represented in the lawsuit by Brian Hauss of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Speech, Privacy, & Technology Project and Robin Cockey of Cockey, Brennan & Maloney P.C.

PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to eat”—opposes speciesism, a human-supremacist worldview. For more information on PETA’s investigative newsgathering and reporting, please visit PETA.org or follow the group on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram.