PETA ‘Trash Fisher’ Nets More Tinder Matches in Study

For Immediate Release:
April 12, 2021

Contact:
Megan Wiltsie 202-483-7382

PETA just announced the results of a local experiment that sought to see who’d get more love on the dating application Tinder: a “trash fisher” holding a bag of garbage or the same man posing with a (digitized) dead fish—and found that the vegan version won hands down.

Contrasting accounts for 27-year-old “Matt” show that he received over 250% more “likes” as a trash fisher than as a traditional fisher on the Greenville Tinder scene. In both profiles, he described himself as “[o]utdoorsy” and a fan of “nature walks,” but in the one, he explained that he “loves fishing for trash,” referring to PETA’s community clean-up initiative.

“Caring about the environment is sexy, while killing animals is a turn-off,” says PETA Executive Vice President Tracy Reiman. “Whether to protect gentle fish from slowly suffocating or to boost your chances at finding love, PETA recommends hanging up that fishing rod and going out to catch some litter.”

PETA notes that traditional fishing is a cruel practice of hooking animals through their sensitive mouths and sometimes even cutting them open while they’re still alive. Even though they feel pain as acutely as mammals do, more fish are killed for food each year than all other animals combined. Some 640,000 tons of fishing “ghost gear” also enter the world’s oceans every year, frequently causing birds to get entangled in discarded fishing lines, swallow hooks, and suffer when hooks become embedded in their skin or beaks.

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