Dog meat scare in Bengaluru prompts PETA India to erect pro-vegan billboard

Bengaluru: Following recent public outrage over a consignment of suspected dog meat weighing about 2,700 kilograms that was transported to a railway station in Bengaluru from Jaipur, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) India erected a billboard near the station calling out meat-eaters’ speciesism (a bias that favours some species over others).

The billboard shows an animal with a goat’s body and a dog’s head, and asks, “If You Wouldn’t Eat a Dog, Don’t Eat a Goat.”, encouraging the public to go vegan.

The billboard campaign aims to remind meat-eaters appalled by the idea of dog meat that both dogs and goats have the capacity to suffer and feel pain and want to live.

“Dogs don’t deserve to be murdered and chopped into pieces so that humans can eat them – but neither do goats, chickens, fish, or any other animals,” says PETA India Manager of Vegan Projects Dr Kiran Ahuja. “PETA India’s billboard makes the simple point that people who are disgusted by eating dogs should question why they consider it acceptable to consume one animal’s flesh but not another’s and go vegan.”

The use of animals for food causes suffering on a massive scale. Dogs are clubbed, fish suffocate or are cut open on the decks of fishing boats, goats’ throats are cut with knives, and pigs are stabbed in the chest.

In the egg industry, chickens are kept in filthy cages so small they can’t spread a single wing and newborn male chicks are ground up, burned, or buried alive since they cannot lay eggs, along with other unwanted chicks. Male calves in the dairy industry are commonly abandoned, left to starve, or killed since they cannot produce milk.

In addition, eating meat and other animal-derived foods has been linked to heart disease, strokes, diabetes, cancer, and obesity, while rearing and killing animals for food has been linked to a multitude of zoonotic diseases including SARS, bird flu, swine flu, and likely COVID-19.

And a United Nations report concluded that a global shift towards vegan eating is necessary to combat the worst effects of the climate catastrophe.