Don’t Grow Up to Be a Murderer: PETA Takes Aim at Hunters’ Kids With Provocative Message

For Immediate Release:
November 14, 2023

Contact:
Sara Groves 202-483-7382

Montgomery, Ala. – Just in time for hunting season, PETA has dropped a hard-hitting new message directly in front of local gun dealer Blethen Firearms and a stone’s throw from several hunting supply stores. The unmissably provocative ad targets the toxic masculinity prevalent among men who kill animals for their own perverse entertainment and calls on youngsters to have a heart, not to harm, and to sit the season out.

“Hunting is a relic of the past with no place in today’s world, where we know—or should know—more about who animals are, and it breeds insensitivity to suffering, destroys conservation efforts, and damages our ecosystems,” says PETA President Ingrid Newkirk. “PETA’s message blasts gun-happy bullies who think that shooting, wounding, and killing unarmed individuals is anything other than wrong.”

PETA points out that, contrary to what hunters often claim, hunting doesn’t support conservation. Natural predators keep wild animal populations healthy by killing only the sickest and the weakest individuals, while human hunters target the largest, most robust animals, whose deaths weaken the gene pool. Hunting devastates entire families when a mother is killed, leaving behind offspring who can’t feed or fend for themselves, and hunters often fail to recover the animals they shoot—who escape only to die slow, agonizing deaths from blood loss, shock, starvation, gangrene, or attacks by predators.

PETA’s message is located at 10270 AL-126 and will be in place until December 31.

PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to abuse in any way”—opposes speciesism, a human-supremacist worldview. For more information, please visit PETA.org, listen to The PETA Podcast, or follow the group on X (formerly Twitter), Facebook, or Instagram.