PETA Attacks Slaughterhouse Openings With Full-Page Ad Appeal to Consumers

Americans Must Start Eating As if Everyone’s Life Depends on Their Choices, Because It Does: Meat Comes From Filthy Factory Farms Rife With Disease

For Immediate Release:
May 1, 2020

Contact:
Nicole Meyer 202-483-7382

Slamming President Trump’s order that slaughterhouses remain open, causing millions of animals to be killed, and even as workers suffer from COVID-19, PETA is running this ad in Sunday’s The Washington Post proclaiming, “America: It’s Time to Move Away From Meat.”

The ad makes the point that U.S. factory farms and slaughterhouses are as filthy as China’s “wet markets,” their floors covered with blood, urine, feces, and offal—and that a meat shortage doesn’t mean a food shortage, because no one needs meat. Consuming it is linked to heart disease, cancer, strokes, high blood pressure, diabetes, and obesity. The ad urges, “Eat As if Everyone’s Life Depends on It, Because It Does.“

“The vegan food supply is strong, so the only thing at risk when slaughterhouses close is the meat industry’s bottom line,” says PETA President Ingrid Newkirk. “PETA stands ready to help with free starter kits, free mentor services, and recipes to aid people in preventing the next pandemic by going vegan.”

The novel coronavirus originated in a Chinese wet market where live and dead animals were sold for human consumption, swine flu began on a U.S. factory farm, and other influenza viruses have been traced to chickens. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warns that approximately 75% of recently emerged infectious diseases affecting humans originated in other animals.

Earlier this month, PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to eat” and which opposes speciesism, a human-supremacist worldview—sent letters to Tyson, Smithfield, and other meat companies offering to help with the cost of retraining employees to produce exclusively vegan meat.

For more information, please visit PETA.org.