‘I’m ME, Not MEAT’ Billboard to Honor Cows Killed in Truck Crash

PETA Memorial Will Encourage People to Keep Animals out of Transport Vehicles by Going Vegan

For Immediate Release:
July 23, 2020

Contact:
Nicole Meyer 202-483-7382

In honor of the dozens of cows who were injured and killed when a truck carrying them overturned on I-10 near the George Wallace Tunnel on July 16, PETA plans to place a billboard near the crash site that proclaims, “See the Individual. Go Vegan.“

“Dozens of gentle cows faced a terrifying death on the highway, and those who survived were rounded up and presumably taken to slaughter,” says PETA Executive Vice President Tracy Reiman. “PETA’s ad encourages anyone disturbed by the thought of animals suffering on the side of the road or facing the slaughterhouse knife to go vegan.”

Cows in the meat industry are often confined to cramped, filthy feedlots without protection from the elements. Calves are torn away from their mothers within hours of birth and are castrated and branded without pain relief. At the slaughterhouse, workers shoot cows in the head with a captive-bolt gun, hang them up by one leg, and cut their throat—often while they’re still conscious and able to feel pain.

PETA notes that confining and killing animals for food has been linked to SARS, swine flu, bird flu, and COVID-19—and a new strain of swine flu with “pandemic potential” has been spreading from pigs to humans in China. The meat industry has also allowed slaughterhouse workers to face a nearly unchecked spread of the novel coronavirus, with more than 36,000 cases among workers recorded so far.

PETA notes that there were more than 100 crashes in 2019 involving trucks carrying animals used for food—and there have already been 55 since the start of 2020.

PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to eat”—opposes speciesism, which is a human-supremacist worldview. For more information, please visit PETA.org.