As Asa Rules Against PETA Ad, PETA Launches New Offensive Against Factory-Farm Filth

For Immediate Release:
13 October 2009

Contact:
Sam Glover 020 7357 9229, ext 229; [email protected]

Glasgow – A new PETA advertisement reading, “Your Demand for Meat Creates Disease. Stop Factory Farming. Go Veg”, and showing a conveyor belt of diseases – including “swine flu”, “mad cow disease”, “MRSA” and “E coli” – travelling from a factory farm into a person’s open mouth has been released on the very day that the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) has announced its ruling against a PETA Europe advertisement that the ASA feels the public is too dense to understand.

Erected in Glasgow in June, the previous billboard read, “Meat Kills: Go Vegetarian”, and was emblazoned with the names of a host of deadly conditions – including swine flu – that are linked to intensive farming systems. The ASA’s decision was sparked by a single complaint from a “member of the public” who said that some people could be confused by the ad, thinking that swine flu was caused by the act of eating meat rather than the demand for meat – which supports the intensive farming conditions that breed disease.

PETA agrees with Hans-Gerhard Wagner, a senior officer with the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation, who has called the intensive industrial farming of livestock an “opportunity for emerging disease”. The group is fighting back by releasing a new ad today that makes the same point. It is thought all flu viruses have originated in animal farming, and factory-farmed pigs and other animals often suffer from chronic flu. Animals on factory farms often have impaired immune systems, and disease spreads on the farms as a result of intensive crowding in filthy sheds. Animals are fed a steady diet of drugs to keep them alive in these unsanitary conditions, increasing the chance that drug-resistant “superbugs” will develop.

“PETA is sending a clear message that meat-eating fuels the demand for filthy factory farms, which, in turn, enable pathogens such as the swine flu virus to multiply, spread and cause infection”, says PETA’s Poorva Joshipura. “The easiest way for consumers to help prevent the development of animalborne disease epidemics and infectious illnesses is to go vegan.”

For more information, please visit PETA.org.uk.