Photos: PETA Billboard Urges Yorkshire Sheep Farmers to Baack Away From Animal Agriculture
11 July 2024
Photos: PETA Billboard Urges Yorkshire Sheep Farmers to Baack Away From Animal Agriculture
Harrogate, Yorkshire – Just in time for the Great Yorkshire Show (9 to 12 July), which is hosting parades and shearing competitions that exploit gentle, non-consenting animals, PETA has placed an eye-catching billboard minutes away from the showground in Yorkshire – home to England’s fourth largest sheep population – urging farmers to ditch cruel, environmentally disastrous sheep farming for arable, vegan methods.
The billboard can be found at the intersection of Butler Road and Rawson Street, Harrogate HG1 4PF and will be live for one week. High-resolution images are available here. Credit: Sarah Warne Photography.
“Everyone needs farmers, but farmers don’t need to exploit animals and interfere with their bodies – for wool, meat, or milk – which is why we encourage them to hang up their shears and leave the heartbreak and violence of sheep farming behind,” says PETA Vice President of Corporate Projects Dawn Carr. “PETA’s billboard urges farmers to transition to sustainable plant farming and grow nutritious vegetables, grains, pulses, and fruits that are kinder to animals, the planet, and our health.”
Sheep exploited for their fleece are genetically manipulated to grow an unnatural amount of wool and routinely abused on farms and in shearing sheds. PETA entities have shared exposés of 117 wool-industry operations around the world – including in the UK – where workers have been documented kicking, punching, and slitting the throats of conscious, struggling sheep. Farmers commonly sever lambs’ tails and castrate the males without pain relief. When their wool production slows, at around 5 or 6 years old, the animals are crammed onto lorries and sent on gruelling journeys to slaughterhouses.
Raising sheep for wool also negatively impacts the environment. As ruminant animals, sheep produce large amounts of methane, a planet-warming greenhouse gas. This, along with the industry’s energy use, the land clearing undertaken to house sheep, the animals’ waste, and the use of chemicals to clean wool, has led the Made-By Environmental Benchmark for Fibres to rank wool as a “Class E” material – the worst category possible.
Each year, millions of lambs bred for their flesh die from exposure, malnutrition, or disease within days of birth, and survivors are typically slaughtered when they’re just 10 weeks old.
PETA – whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to eat, wear or abuse in any other way” and which opposes speciesism, a human-supremacist worldview – recently launched a campaign urging the government to fund ethical and sustainable plant farming. Last year, the group also announced the winners of its first-ever Farming Awards. For more information, please visit PETA.org.uk or follow the group on Facebook, X, TikTok, or Instagram.
Contact:
Lucy Watson +44 (0) 20 7837 6327; [email protected]
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