‘Killing Animals Is Killing Us All’: Striking Mural of Sick Slaughterhouse Workers Goes Up in Brooklyn

PETA-Commissioned Art Appeals for Compassion for Animals and Slaughterhouse Workers Who Are Losing Their Lives

For Immediate Release:
July 21, 2020

Contact:
Nicole Meyer 202-483-7382

As the number of slaughterhouse workers who are known to have tested positive for COVID-19 climbs above 35,000—nearly 90% of whom are Black, Latinx, or Asian, according to a recent Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) report—and as sickness figures are being blocked by state governments, artist Choice Bison drives home the message that going vegan is a move for social justice.

“Every bite of meat supports an industry whose very business of moving large numbers of animals—their blood mixing with offal—breeds killer diseases and makes workers sick,” says PETA Executive Vice President Tracy Reiman. “As COVID-19 infects slaughterhouse workers and their families, PETA is spreading the message that it’s time to go vegan, for everyone’s sake.”

In slaughterhouses, workers stand shoulder-to-shoulder and slit animals’ throats above blood- and offal-soaked floors, with line speeds so fast that animals end up thrashing around and injuring them—conditions that allow COVID-19 to spread. The CDC has recorded that slaughterhouse workers face an infection rate that’s nine times higher than the overall U.S. infection rate.

PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to eat” and which opposes speciesism, a human-supremacist worldview—notes that confining and killing animals for food has been linked to SARS, swine flu, bird flu, and COVID-19 and that a new strain of swine flu with “pandemic potential” is now spreading from pigs to humans in China.

The mural is located at 48 Morgan Ave. in East Williamsburg.

Resources for going vegan on PETA’s website include vegan starter kits. For more information, please visit PETA.org.