Teen Unleashes ‘Scent of Death’—Smells of Slaughterhouse—on Shoppers

New PETA App Delivers All the Odors of Animals Killed for Food in the Run-Up to Memorial Day

For Immediate Release:
May 21, 2014

Contact:
David Perle 202-483-7382

Shoppers leaving a Ralphs store in Los Angeles on Tuesday who had chicken in their grocery bags were treated to a big surprise: the “Scent of Death,” compliments of 15-year-old Joseph Arambula via PETA’s new Meat Stinks app, which unleashes a spray of slaughterhouse smells when used to scan the barcodes of refrigerated and frozen chicken products. The teen’s goal? To change the minds of shoppers about eating flesh. The action was to mark Memorial Day (May 26), when many people will host or attend barbecues and not give a second thought to whom they’re eating. PETA will be distributing the technology to kids nationwide.

“It’s time for Americans to rethink honoring their country’s fallen service members by eating the corpses of animals who didn’t want to die,” says PETA Executive Vice President Tracy Reiman. “All people have to do is go vegan, and the ‘scent of death’ will never haunt them again.”

The more than 7 billion chickens killed for their flesh every year in the U.S. spend their entire lives in filthy sheds with tens of thousands of other birds, where intense crowding and confinement lead to outbreaks of disease. They are bred and often drugged to grow so large so quickly that their legs and organs can’t keep up, making heart attacks, organ failure, and severely deformed legs common. When they are only 6 or 7 weeks old, they are crammed into cages and trucked to slaughter, where they are painfully killed. Millions are scalded to death in defeathering tanks.

For more information, please visit PETA.org.