‘Scale’ Up! PETA LAMBS Launches Massive Fish Empathy Campaign for Lent

For Immediate Release:
February 28, 2025

Contact:
Nicole Perreira 202-483-7382

Blitzing buses with pro-vegan appeals, showing churchgoers that there’s no difference between cats and fish, and offering to send a beautiful Fish Empathy Quilt to churches: It’s all part of PETA’s faith outreach division, PETA LAMBS’ (“Least Among My Brothers and Sisters” from Matthew 25:40) national 2025 campaign to encourage believers to have a truly merciful Lenten season by keeping all meat, including fish, off their plates.

PETA LAMBS’ campaign includes the following actions:

• Encouraging, among others, the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York—one of the biggest cathedrals in the world—to exhibit PETA’s Fish Empathy Quilt, which measures more than 300 square feet and comprises more than 100 handcrafted squares from kind people, including cartoonist Harry Bliss and oceanographic explorer Jean-Michel Cousteau.
• Offering to donate $1,000 toward the Society of St. Joseph’s fundraising goal for the restoration of the historic St. Joseph’s Roman Catholic Church in Pennsylvania—if it agrees to erect a PETA ad showing a fish and the message, “I Never Lent You My Flesh” in the church for Lent.
• Placing ads showing a worried-looking fish alongside the words, “My Life is In Your Hands. Please, Try Vegan,” on buses in New York and Oregon, as well as near various eateries that serve fish and chips in those cities and in Minneapolis.
• Blitzing sidewalk kiosks near churches and restaurants serving sea life in Maryland with videos showing a smiling fishmonger holding a limp fish in one frame with the words “Sea Things”—before the image transitions to the fishmonger holding a dead cat alongside the message, “Sea Things in a Different Light. Respect All Life. Go Vegan.”

“Lent is an apt time to reflect on Scripture and our call to serve as stewards of all God’s creation,” says PETA Faith Outreach Coordinator Sarah McFarlane, a Christian who would never eat sea life during Lent or anytime. “PETA LAMBS is making a splash nationwide with its efforts to help keep fish safe in the oceans, as God intended.”

Fish feel pain as acutely as mammals do, have long-term memories, and sing underwater. Yet more fish are killed for food each year than all other animals combined. Each person who goes vegan spares nearly 200 animals every year, dramatically shrinks their food-related carbon footprint, and avoids ingesting the many toxic chemicals found in the flesh of fish, including mercury, lead, and polychlorinated biphenyls.

PETA LAMBS offers easy vegan recipes for Lent on its website, and PETA provides a free vegan starter kit to anyone interested in making the switch. Many wonderful “seafood” products are also available in grocery stores and online, and PETA’s library of easy-to-make recipes includes these 17 Fabulous Vegan Fish Recipes, whose highlights include “Fish” and Chips With Vegan Tartar Sauce, Filet-O-Fish-Less sandwich, “Fish” Tacos, and more.

PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to eat”—points out that Every Animal Is Someone and offers free Empathy Kits for people who need a lesson in kindness. For more information, please visit PETA.org or follow PETA on X, Facebook, or Instagram.