Update: PETA Ad Memorializes Cows Killed After Truck Crash

For Immediate Release:
April 1, 2021

Contact:
Nicole Meyer 202-483-7382

PETA has just placed a billboard on I-74 near the intersection with I-94 that reads, “See the Individual. Go Vegan,” a memorial to the 18 cows who were shot dead after a truck carrying them overturned on the highway in February.

“Cows are gentle giants who have thoughts and feelings just like anyone else,” says PETA President Ingrid Newkirk. “If PETA’s billboard persuades even one person to stop eating animals, we will have done something good.”

The truck was transporting Holstein cows, the breed most often used by the dairy industry, in which workers artificially inseminate cows—a process no female would wish to be subjected to—and then tear the calves away from their loving mothers within hours of their birth. The male calves are sent to slaughter, while females endure the same fate as their mothers—repeated forced pregnancies until their bodies break down and they’re slaughtered for cheap meat.

In the U.S. alone, there were at least 78 crashes in 2020 involving trucks carrying animals used for food—and there have been 16 so far this year. Each person who goes vegan saves nearly 200 cows, pigs, chickens, and other animals every year and can help prevent future pandemics: Confining and killing animals for food has been linked to SARS, swine flu, bird flu, and COVID-19, and slaughterhouse workers have faced a high rate of infection during the current pandemic.

PETA’s billboard is located at 1313 E. Milwaukee St.

PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to eat or abuse in any other way”—opposes speciesism, a human-supremacist worldview. For more information, please visit PETA.org or follow the group on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram.