Executions Prompt Ad Against Needlessly Killing Animals for Food

Billions of Pigs, Cows, Chickens, and Other Animals End Up on Death Row Every Year—None Did Anything to Warrant Such a Bad End

For Immediate Release:
April 21, 2017

Contact:
Sophia Charchuk 202-483-7382

As Arkansas moves forward with plans to execute three inmates before the end of April, PETA is working with the city to place a transit ad that asks people to consider everyone on death row—including those who happen not to be human but also wish to live.

The ad shows a pair of frightened pigs in a slaughter pen next to the words “Not Everybody on Death Row Has Committed a Crime. Try Vegan.” PETA (whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to eat”) points out that billions of animals spend their lives imprisoned in cages, sheds, and filthy feedlots before they’re killed—often painfully and always in frightening ways—for human consumption.

“No matter where you stand on the death penalty, it’s clear that animals’ executions are needless and cruel in these days of so many food choices,” says PETA President Ingrid Newkirk. “PETA is calling on everyone to grant chickens, pigs, and cows life by ordering a free vegan starter kit today.”

More than 1 million pigs die each year on severely crowded transport trucks before they even reach the slaughterhouse. They often freeze, suffocate, die of heart attacks, or are trampled or crushed in traffic accidents. And botched executions are common in the meat industry. Pigs who make it to the slaughterhouse are often improperly and ineptly stunned and end up being plunged, alive and conscious, into scalding tanks.

For more information, please visit PETA.org.