PETA Hands Out Free Toilet Paper in Sydney Printed With an Important Message
As Australians continue to panic-buy loo rolls amid fears of a coronavirus outbreak, PETA has come to the rescue by handing out free toilet paper in Sydney, each sheet printed with the message “Wipe Out Animal-Borne Illness: Go Vegan.”
A stack of PETA’s toilet paper – – provided by Toilet Face.
Amid the mass hysteria around toilet paper, PETA has a message that gets to the bottom of the problem: this outbreak probably wouldn’t have happened if people didn’t breed and eat animals.
Public health experts believe the virus originated at a fish market, where close contact between humans and live animals in a small space made it easy for the virus to jump species.
According to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, more than 75% of emerging diseases originate in animals. In this way, COVID-19 is similar to other infamous coronaviruses, such as severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) and Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS). COVID-19, SARS, and MERS all spread from animals to humans.
Human demand for meat means that huge numbers of animals, such as chickens and pigs, are crammed together on crowded, faeces-ridden farms, transported in filthy lorries, and slaughtered on killing floors soaked with blood, urine, and other bodily fluids. Pathogens flourish in such conditions, making factory farms a breeding ground for new strains of dangerous bacteria and viruses, which is why today, more than half the antibiotics used in Australia are fed to farmed animals. According to the British National Health Service, agricultural antibiotic use is driving up levels of antibiotic resistance, leading to new “superbugs”, and Hans-Gerhard Wagner of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization has called the “intensive industrial farming of livestock” an “opportunity for emerging disease”.
With every flush, PETA’s toilet paper will remind users that the best thing that any of us can do to help animals raised for food, who are at risk of suffering from diseases borne from the horrific conditions in which they live, is to avoid meat like the plague.
So live and let animals live – and stop buying up all the toilet paper.
