Goans Asked ‘If You Wouldn’t Eat a Dog, Why Eat a Pig?’ in Billboard Campaign by PETA India

For Immediate Release:

20 June 2023

Contact:

Hiraj Laljani; [email protected]

Sanskriti Bansore; [email protected]

Panjim – In an effort to challenge speciesism (the bias in favour of one species over another), People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) India has erected a billboard in Goa showing an animal with a pig’s body and a dog’s head asking Goans, “If You Wouldn’t Eat a Dog, Why Eat a Pig?”. The initiative invites the public to recognise that both dogs and pigs have the capacity to suffer and feel pain and want to live and encourages people to go vegan.

The billboard is located on Colva Beach Road, Seraulim, Goa 403708.

A copy of the billboard campaign is available upon request.

“Many Goans love dogs but eat pigs, even though pigs are sensitive, social, and playful like dogs,” says PETA India Manager of Vegan Projects Dr Kiran Ahuja. “PETA India’s billboard makes the simple point that anyone who would be enraged by the thought of eating dogs should question why they consider it acceptable to consume one animal’s flesh but not another’s and go vegan.”

Pigs are widely consumed in Goa, and the use of any animal for food causes suffering on a massive scale. Pigs are stabbed in the chest, and fish suffocate or are cut open on the decks of fishing boats. In the egg industry, chickens are kept in filthy cages so small they can’t spread a single wing and newborn male chicks are ground up, burned, or buried alive since they cannot lay eggs, along with other unwanted chicks. Male calves in the dairy industry are commonly abandoned, left to starve, or killed because they cannot produce milk.

In addition, eating meat and other animal-derived foods has been linked to heart disease, strokes, diabetes, cancer, and obesity, while rearing and killing animals for food has been linked to a multitude of zoonotic diseases including SARS, bird flu, swine flu, Ebola, HIV, and likely COVID-19. A United Nations report concluded that a global shift towards vegan eating is necessary to combat the worst effects of the climate catastrophe.

PETA India – whose motto reads in, in part, that “animals are not ours to eat” – opposes speciesism, a human-supremacist worldview. For more information, please visit PETAIndia.com or follow the group on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram.

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