Update: PETA Billboard Rises to Honor Cows Killed in Truck Crash

Memorial Near Site of Wreck Encourages People to Keep Animals off the Road by Going Vegan

For Immediate Release:
December 16, 2020

Contact:
Brooke Rossi 202-483-7382

In memory of the five cows who were killed when a truck carrying them overturned on I-81 on November 13, PETA has placed a billboard on the highway that proclaims, “See the Individual. Go Vegan.”

“If PETA’s message of compassion inspires just one driver to go vegan, then these gentle cows won’t have died in vain,” says PETA Executive Vice President Tracy Reiman. “We can all eat delicious vegan food and prevent animals from experiencing a terrifying death in slaughterhouses or on the roadside.”

The truck was transporting Holstein cows, the breed most often used by the dairy industry, in which workers artificially inseminate cows (rape them by inserting an arm into the rectum and a metal rod into the vagina) and tear calves away from their loving mothers within a day of birth. They ship male calves off to be slaughtered for veal, while females endure the same fate as their mothers: repeated forced pregnancies until their bodies break down and they’re slaughtered for cheap meat.

PETA notes that there have been at least 74 crashes this year involving trucks carrying animals used for food. Each person who goes vegan saves the lives of nearly 200 cows, pigs, chickens, and other animals every year and helps prevent future pandemics: Confining and killing animals for food has been linked to SARS, swine flu, bird flu, and COVID-19, and the meat industry has allowed slaughterhouse workers to face a nearly unchecked spread of the novel coronavirus.

PETA’s billboard is located on I-81, near Exit 10, in McGraw.

PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to eat or abuse in any other way”—opposes speciesism, which is a human-supremacist worldview. For more information, please visit PETA.org or follow the group on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram.