PETA India Earth Day Billboard Blitz Highlights the Marine Victims of Discarded Plastic Fishing Gear

To mark Earth Day (22 April), PETA India is flooding the country’s coast – where eating fish is prevalent – with billboards that depict a turtle ensnared in plastic netting as a reminder that killing fish also costs turtles their lives. These billboards have been erected in Chennai, Goa, Kochi, Kolkata, and Mumbai. Up to 1 million tonnes of fishing gear – which can take 600 years to degrade – enters oceans every year, killing over 250,000 turtles who get caught in it.

Chennai: Vanagaram 346X+WGM, Ganga Nagar, Maduravoyal, Chennai, Tamil Nadu 600 095

Goa: Fish market, Panjim, Altinho, Panaji, Goa 403 001

Kolkata: Rashbehari Xing, 156 SP Mukherjee Road and RB Avenue, Kolkata, West Bengal 700 026

Kochi: Goshree bridge to Vypin, near the KSINC Nefertiti Cruise Terminal, Kochi, Kerala 682 504

Called “bycatch” by the fishing industry, non-target animals killed by fishing gear also include 720,000 seabirds, 300,000 whales and dolphins, 345,000 seals and sea lions, and 100 million sharks and rays. PETA India notes that fishing is considered the biggest threat to marine wildlife.

More fish are killed for food each year than all other animals combined. Fish feel pain as acutely as mammals do, have long-term memories, and sing underwater – yet they and other marine animals are impaled, crushed, suffocated, dropped into pots of boiling water, or cut open and gutted, all while they are still conscious.