100 Dead Sharks Lead to Billboard: Humans Have “the Deadliest Jaws”!

Try Choosing Vegan Meals and Trillions of Interesting and Intelligent Fish Will Be Spared Suffocation, Says PETA

For Immediate Release:
July 18, 2016

Contact:
David Perle 202-483-7382

Because nearly 100 bull sharks have washed up along Mobile Bay beaches—40 of them tangled in fishing nets—PETA is negotiating with outdoor advertisers to place a local billboard pointing out that fish, including sharks, have far more to fear from humans than the other way around, but that doesn’t have to be the case. The ad features a huge human mouth and the words “The Deadliest Jaws? Yours. Go Vegan.” For each human killed by a shark, 2 million sharks are killed by humans—about 11,000 sharks die by human hands every hour. And every year, humans kill and consume trillions of marine animals, including billions of fish who are caught, processed or—together with turtles, dolphins, and other sea life who get entangled in nets—discarded as “bycatch.”

“While sharks kill an average of five humans a year globally, humans kill up to 100 million sharks every year for fins, flesh, and fun as well as billions of other fish we now know to be socially complex and intelligent,” says PETA President Ingrid Newkirk. “PETA’s billboard is a reminder that each of us can save hundreds of aquatic animals, including dolphins and turtles, every year by choosing vegan meals instead of fish.”

Humans consume more fish annually than all other animals combined, and the demand for shark-fin soup has resulted in overfishing and dwindling shark populations. Shark finning entails dragging sharks—who studies show have individual personalities—to the surface, hacking their fins off, and throwing them back into the ocean to die slowly from their injuries, stress, or suffocation.

Most fish commonly served in restaurants and supermarkets are caught using huge, sometimes miles-long commercial-fishing nets that stretch across ocean floors, trapping “trash catch” such as dolphins, turtles, and seals. When hauled up from the ocean, fish—who are highly sensitive to pain—are often crushed to death, and their eyeballs bulge out of their heads from the pressure change of sudden surfacing. Others are gutted alive.

PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to eat”—offers free vegan starter kits and encourages everyone to try healthy, humane vegan meals such as Gardein’s delicious Golden Fishless Filets.

For more information, please visit PETA.org.