PETA’s Pointed Reminder to Meat-Eaters Wailing About the Amazon Fires

For Immediate Release:
August 23, 2019

Contact:
Moira Colley 202-483-7382

While certain meat-eating celebrities and others take to Twitter to express their abject horror over the fires burning vast swaths of the largest rainforest on Earth—the Amazon—PETA is calling them out for being part of the problem that’s fueling the fires: the personal demand for meat. Animal agriculture is the leading cause of deforestation in the Amazon and elsewhere, and more than 90% of the Amazon rainforest that’s been cleared since 1970 is used for meat production, either for grazing or for growing food for cattle, including those in the U.S. market.

In a cheeky post on Twitter, PETA writes, “Shut up about the Amazon burning if your mouth is full of meat.”

“Whether it’s steak or bone broth, if it’s going down your gullet, you’re the reason the Amazon is going down the tubes—whereas going vegan shows that you actually do care,” says PETA Director Jennifer Belchambers.

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.