PETA India urges Delhiites to 'Move Away From Meat' to stop future pandemics

Delhi – As the world continues to experience the deadly effects of COVID-19 – which is overwhelmingly believed to have jumped the species barrier from infected animals to humans at a live-animal market in China – PETA India is urging everyone to help stop another pandemic by running ads in this today's Delhi and Mumbai's Sunday editions of the Times of India that proclaim, "India: It's Time to Move Away From Meat."

The ads point out that India's live-animal markets, factory farms, and slaughterhouses are as filthy as China's "wet markets", their floors covered with blood, urine, faeces, and offal – and that no one needs to eat meat. Consuming it not only causes animal suffering but also comes back to bite consumers in the form of heart disease, cancer, strokes, high blood pressure, diabetes, and obesity. The ads, which feature a sickly chicken lying face down on an Indian poultry farm, urge, "Eat as if Everyone's Life Depends on It, Because It Does."

"Many people feel powerless in the face of this health crisis, but everyone has control over what, or who, is on their plates," says veterinarian and PETA India CEO Dr Manilal Valliyate. "PETA India stands ready with free vegan starter kits, tips, and recipes to help people stay healthy and try to prevent the next pandemic."

At the Chinese market where the novel coronavirus is believed to have first infected humans through bats or possibly pangolins, live and dead animals were sold for human consumption. SARS first infected humans at a similar Chinese live-animal market. Swine flu, which killed up to 575,000 people worldwide in the first year it circulated alone, is considered to have originated in US factory farms. Meanwhile, bird flu, which has a 60% mortality rate, routinely plagues chicken farms. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warns that approximately 75% of recently emerged infectious diseases affecting humans originated in other animals.

The ads feature a chicken because chickens used for meat in India and around the world are now purposely bred to grow so large so fast that they often have trouble standing and walking and even have heart failure when they're just a few weeks old. On today's factory farms, they're confined to crowded, filthy sheds amidst their own waste. The ammonia from their combined waste often causes sores, burns, and ulcers on their bodies, and when combined with the dust from their feathers and skin, the birds regularly experience respiratory and eye problems.

PETA India – whose motto reads, in part, that "animals are not ours to eat" and which opposes speciesism, a human-supremacist worldview – offers recipes, an order link for free vegan starter kits, and other helpful resources on vegan eating at PETAIndia.com.

(We got this information from a press release.)