Rejected! PETA’s Pro-Vegan Ads Deemed Too Controversial for Tulsa Transit

Contact:
Sara Groves 202-483-7382

Tulsa, Okla. – If you wouldn’t eat a dog, why eat a pig or a turkey? That’s the message PETA planned to place on local buses ahead of Oktoberfest and Thanksgiving—until Tulsa Transit adopted a new ad policy just a few weeks before the ads were set to run, rejecting them as “not appropriate” and offensive to nonvegans, effectively giving PETA no chance to challenge the decision in time.

Tulsa Transit first rejected the ads—which ask people to choose vegan foods and leave animals in peace—as “controversial” in March but reversed its decision after PETA challenged the constitutionality of the rejection and the then-current ad policy. PETA points out that there’s nothing objectionable or offensive about its family-friendly appeals to spare animals’ lives, especially given the prevalence of ads that promote eating animals.

“What’s offensive is the inner workings of the meat industry, in which animals who are just as loving, intelligent, and sensitive as dogs are confined in filth and their throats are cut while they’re still conscious,” says PETA President Ingrid Newkirk. “America risks becoming the land of no free speech if city agencies can pick and choose which opinions to air, and PETA is determined to exercise its First Amendment right to encourage everyone to go vegan.”

Pigs and turkeys are no different from dogs when it comes to feeling pain and fear. In today’s meat industry, mother pigs are squeezed into narrow metal stalls barely larger than their bodies and kept almost constantly pregnant or nursing. Pigs’ tails are chopped off, their teeth are cut with pliers, and males are castrated—often without any pain relief. During turkeys’ short lives, they’re forced to stand in their own waste and inhale ammonia-laden air inside dark warehouses. The birds are bred to grow so large that their legs break under them. At slaughterhouses, terrified animals are hung upside down and bled to death, often while still conscious.

In addition to sparing the lives of nearly 200 animals a year, everyone who goes vegan shrinks their carbon footprint and reduces their risk of suffering from heart disease, diabetes, cancer, and other ailments.

PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to eat”—opposes speciesism, a human-supremacist worldview, and offers a free vegan starter kit on its website. For more information, please visit PETA.org, listen to The PETA Podcast, or follow the group on X (formerly Twitter), Facebook, or Instagram.