Oregon Bird Flu Outbreak Prompts Pointed Appeal From PETA

For Immediate Release:
May 11, 2022

Contact:
Brooke Rossi 202-483-7382

On the heels of an avian flu outbreak on a Linn County chicken farm, PETA plans to place a sky-high warning on I-5 near where the disease outbreak occurred: “The Writing Is on the Wall. Go Vegan.” It’s a reminder that crowded poultry farms are breeding grounds for dangerous zoonotic illnesses, just as COVID-19 is believed to have originated at a “wet market” where live and dead animals were sold for food.

“Tofu factories have never caused a zoonotic outbreak, but farms in the business of harming birds risk more pandemics,” says PETA President Ingrid Newkirk. “PETA is calling on anyone who didn’t read the writing on the wall after COVID-19 to choose kind, healthy, vegan meals now.”

PETA notes that avian flu outbreaks have been reported on commercial farms and “backyard farms” in at least 24 states. After outbreaks, workers slowly smother chickens to death with a water-based foam, gas them to death, or shut off all airflow in densely packed chicken sheds, often while raising the heat to as high as 120 degrees and adding carbon dioxide—suffocating and baking the birds to death, an agonizing process that can take hours.

Vegan products such as tofu, meat-free tenders, plant-based “turkey” and other deli slices, and egg-free mayonnaise are widely available and involve none of the cruelty—or the saturated animal fat and cholesterol—that bird flesh and eggs do.

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.