Video: Uninvited PETA Protesters Join Grand Parade to Call Out Budweiser’s Cruelty to Horses

For Immediate Release:
August 5, 2023

Contact:
David Perle 202-483-7382

Today, PETA supporters at the Canton Repository Grand Parade, which featured NFL Hall of Famers, hopped a barricade of spectators and marched behind the Budweiser Clydesdales’ entourage with a large banner demanding that Anheuser-Busch stop amputating horses’ tailbones. The protesters carried the banner behind the Clydesdales for six blocks over the course of 20 minutes, until police escorted them away from the parade route. Video footage and photos of the disruption are available here.

As PETA recently revealed in a damning video exposé, Budweiser has been severing Clydesdales’ tailbones—either with a scalpel or with a tight band that stops the blood supply to the tail, causing it to die and fall off—just so they’ll look a certain way when hitched to a beer wagon. Tailbone amputation for cosmetic reasons is condemned by the American Veterinary Medical Association and the American Association of Equine Practitioners and is illegal in 10 states and a number of countries. The practice causes immense pain, affects horses’ balance, and removes their first line of defense against biting and disease-spreading insects.

“Paradegoers now know that the Budweiser Clydesdales’ tailbones have been chopped off by Anheuser-Busch to sell beer,” says PETA Senior Vice President Kathy Guillermo. “Security can force PETA out of the parade, but it can’t stop the world from finding out that Budweiser has blood on its cans.”

PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to use for entertainment”—opposes speciesism, a human-supremacist worldview. For more information on PETA’s investigative newsgathering and reporting, please visit PETA.org, listen to The PETA Podcast, or follow the group on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram.

#