For Immediate Release:
September 30, 2003

Contact:
Matt Prescott 757-622-7382   

Richmond, Va. — As PETA’s controversial "Holocaust on Your Plate" project tours cities throughout the U.S.—stirring up controversy at every stop—the group will run a brand-new TV commercial asking consumers to consider how it feels to endure a frightening journey to one’s death. PETA decided to air the ad in Richmond after the Virginia Holocaust Museum failed to reply to a letter asking that it include the ad as part of a new exhibit containing an actual cattle car that was used in the Holocaust. In the ad, the world outside is seen through the slats in the side of a truck as a man’s voice intones, "They came for us at night. Beat us. We cried out in the darkness. With no food, no water, and barely air to breathe." The ad ends with the tagline: "Each age has its own atrocities. End the animals’ holocaust. Please become a vegetarian." Though this controversial ad was rejected by TV stations in other states, it was accepted by WRIC-TV and will air on Tuesday during the local news at 6 p.m.

"During the Holocaust, the Nazis used cattle cars to transport people to concentration camps," says PETA Campaign Coordinator Matt Prescott, members of whose family were murdered by the Nazis. "Animals today are powerless to stop the long, painful trip to their deaths, as were victims of the Holocaust. The Virginia Holocaust Museum can help people understand that peace begins on the plate."

The goal of PETA’s ad, which is funded by a Jewish philanthropist, is to stimulate contemplation of how the victimization of Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, and others characterized as "life unworthy of life" during the Holocaust parallels the way that modern society justifies the abuse and slaughter of animals. Just as the Nazis tried to debase Jews—by forcing them to live in filthy, crowded conditions; tearing children away from their mothers; and killing them in assembly-line fashion—innocent, intelligent, and feeling beings of other species are, in today’s concentration camp-like factory farms, stripped of all that is enjoyable and natural to them and treated as nothing more than meat-, egg-, and milk-producing "machines."

During the Holocaust, "undesirables" were transported in boxcars through all weather extremes, where many died from heat exhaustion or from freezing to the sides of boxcars. Today, animals spend days crammed into trucks, suffering through extreme heat, cold, wind, and rain—in the winter, they freeze to the metal truck slats, and in the summer, they slip and fall or collapse from dehydration and heat prostration. At the slaughterhouse, the survivors are dragged from the trucks, their worn-out bodies are hung upside-down, and their throats are slit.

For more information about PETA’s "Holocaust on Your Plate" project and to view the commercial, please visit MassKilling.com.