PETA honors memory of cattle with billboard

In honor of the 10 cows who died—and the many others who were injured—when a truck carrying them overturned on Interstate 20 in Richland Parish last November, PETA has placed a billboard near the crash site showing a cow’s face next to the words “I’m ME, Not MEAT. See the Individual. Go Vegan.”

 The billboard went up on Jan. 10 and is located 0.7 miles west of Exit 138 on I-20.

“Ten gentle cows died in this wreck, and those who survived were rounded up and taken to a livestock auction before being strung upside down and killed,” says PETA Executive Vice President Tracy Reiman. “PETA’s billboard pays homage to their unnecessarily short lives and urges motorists to prevent future suffering by keeping cows and all other animals off their plates.”

PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to eat”—notes that before cows are loaded onto trucks bound for auctions and slaughterhouses, they’re often confined to cramped, filthy feedlots without protection from the elements or temperature extremes. Calves are torn away from their mothers within hours of birth and are castrated and branded without painkillers. At the slaughterhouse, workers shoot cows in the head with a captive-bolt gun, hang them up by one leg, and cut their throats—often while they’re still conscious.

For more information, please visit PETA.org.