Friends in High Places: 3.5-Metre-Tall ‘Animals’ on Stilts Urge Public to Stand Tall for Animals by Going Vegan
PETA India supporters in Chennai took their advocacy for animals to new heights (literally), as they strapped on stilts and wore chicken, cow, and goat masks to denounce speciesism and urged passers–by to go vegan.
Speciesism, like sexism, racism, and other forms of discrimination, is the flawed viewpoint that some individuals are inferior to others and that it’s acceptable to exploit them. A human-supremacist worldview, speciesism is the belief that other species are inferior to humans, and thus other animals are exploited even though they share our capacity for pain, hunger, fear, thirst, love, joy, and loneliness and have as much interest in freedom and staying alive as humans do.
As PETA India reveals in its video exposé “Glass Walls”, chickens used for eggs are confined to cages so small they can’t spread a single wing. Cows and buffaloes are crammed into vehicles in such large numbers that their bones often break before they’re dragged off to a slaughterhouse, and pigs are stabbed in the heart as they scream. On the decks of fishing boats, fish suffocate or are cut open while they’re still alive. Male chicks and calves are often killed soon after birth because they cannot lay eggs or produce milk.
Every vegan saves nearly 200 animals a year from abuse and a violent, painful death and improves their own health, since vegans are less prone to heart disease, cancer, diabetes, and strokes. Researchers at the University of Oxford found that not consuming meat and dairy can reduce an individual’s carbon footprint from food by up to 73% and that a global switch to vegan eating could save up to 8 million human lives by 2050 and reduce greenhouse gas emissions by two-thirds.
