Sunny Leone Is PETA’s Person Of The Year

For her dedication to promoting the rescue of homeless dogs and cats as well as her compassion for animals abused and killed for their flesh, actor Sunny Leone has been named PETA’s Person of the Year for 2016.

Earlier this year, Leone starred in a PETA ad campaign in which she encouraged fans to “be an angel” by adopting a homeless dog. She also put her money where her mouth is by helping PETA find a home for a puppy who had been abandoned during the monsoon.

She has also gone vegetarian, saying, “I have seen things I can’t erase from my mind which made me stop eating meat”.

Leone knows it’s also vital to combat the root cause of animal homelessness, which is why she appeared in another PETA ad next to the words “Birth Control! Dogs Need It, Too. Sterilise Your Dogs and Cats”. “I believe that every single dog should be spayed and neutered”, she says. “You don’t want to continue the cycle of homeless dogs or cats. And spaying and neutering also keeps them healthy. It prevents them from having different diseases that they can get if they’re not.”

And as seen in PETA’s exposé “Glass Walls”, in today’s industrialised meat industries, chickens’ throats are cut while they’re still conscious, fish suffocate or are cut open while they’re still alive, and pigs are often stabbed in the heart as they scream in pain. At the slaughterhouse, animals are often killed in full view of one another and dismembered while they’re still conscious.

Past recipients of PETA’s Person of the Year Award include Dr Shashi Tharoor, former Supreme Court Justice KS Panicker Radhakrishnan, and actors Kapil Sharma, Hema Malini, R Madhavan, and Jacqueline Fernandez.