COVID-19 Outbreaks Prompt Call to Close 2 Sisters Abattoirs

For Immediate Release:

1 July 2020

Contact:

Sascha Camilli +44 (0) 20 7923 6244; [email protected]

COVID-19 Outbreaks Prompt Call to Close 2 Sisters Abattoirs

As Meat Industry Is Linked to Fatal Viruses, PETA Calls On Company to Switch to Producing Vegan Meat

Wakefield, West Yorkshire – As COVID-19 sweeps through European abattoirs, making an estimated 3,000 workers ill and leading to 14 deaths to date, PETA has sent a letter (available here) calling on 2 Sisters Food Group – which closed one facility on Anglesey on 18 June  – to close all its abattoirs and consider reopening them as vegan meat–production plants instead.

“Abattoir and meat-plant workers are forced to stand shoulder to shoulder, up to their elbows in blood and offal, in cold, filthy conditions where diseases like COVID-19 can spread like wildfire,” says PETA Director Elisa Allen. “PETA is calling on 2 Sisters to lead by example, meet the skyrocketing demand for vegan food, and protect animals and workers by reinventing itself as a producer of vegan meat.”

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warns that approximately 75% of recently emerging infectious diseases affecting humans originated in other animals. Mad cow disease came from the spinal cords of cows that were cut out at slaughter, the novel coronavirus originated in a live-animal market, and previous influenza viruses started in pigs and chickens. Public-health experts have warned that the second wave of COVID-19 in London is expected to come from abattoirs.

Twenty-five per cent of young millennials as well as 22% of Londoners told Mintel that vegan eating is now more appealing to them. Growth in vegan meat sales was 50% higher than growth in sales of animal flesh during the panic-buying frenzy (8 to 29 March), and they grew at a rate of 61% in the following four weeks as sales of animal flesh declined.

PETA – whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to eat” and which opposes speciesism, a human-supremacist worldview – offers a free vegan starter kit on its website. For more information, please visit PETA.org.uk.

#