Peppa-Inspired Cartoon Pig Billboard Banned, Deemed Too Distressing for Children

Southampton – An advertising firm has rejected a proposal by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) to run a sweet, non-graphic advert outside the Mayflower Theatre in Southampton – the venue for recent performances of Peppa Pig’s Fun Day Out – which invites audiences to honour the popular piglet by going vegan. The agency claimed that the ad featuring a happy cartoon pig risked causing “undue distress to a child”.

The image is also available here.

“Many Peppa fans would agree that pigs are sensitive individuals, not sausages or strips of bacon,” says PETA Vice President of Programmes Elisa Allen. “Children have a natural empathy towards animals and are usually keen to learn about ways to help them. PETA’s sweet advert aimed to help children do just that by starting family dialogues about preventing animal suffering by eating vegan meals.”

PETA has released two eyewitness exposés – which can be viewed here and here – revealing that pigs languish in shocking conditions on UK farms. Farmers often clip or grind down piglets’ teeth and cut their tails off without any painkillers. After females give birth, they’re confined to farrowing crates so small that they can’t even turn around, let alone fulfil their strong urge to build a nest as they would naturally do. They’re forcibly impregnated over and over again, and each litter of piglets is torn away from them after only a few weeks and transported to fattening pens before eventually being sent to slaughter.

PETA – whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to eat” – opposes speciesism, a human-supremacist worldview. For more information, please visit PETA.org.uk or follow the group on Facebook, X (formerly Twitter), TikTok, or Instagram.

Contact:

Lucy Watson +44 (0) 20 7837 6327; [email protected]

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