PETA creates jigsaw puzzle on animal-pandemic link

Lucknow, April 15 (IANS) The People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) India has created a new product to help people keep busy during the lockdown. It is a unique jigsaw puzzle that illustrates the link between animal, agriculture and deadly pandemics — from SARS to Ebola to avian and swine flu — and the puzzle includes tips to help people go vegan.

According to PETA India’s vegan outreach coordinator Kiran Ahuja, “Social distancing is vital, but PETA India is urging everyone to save their own lives, animals’ lives, and the planet by rejecting all animal-derived foods.”

The new jigsaw puzzles will be sent to Prime Minister Narendra Modi as soon as postal services resume.

The PETA release said that the informative exercise offers food for thought on preventing more pandemics.

“As a result of human demand for meat, eggs, and dairy, a huge numbers of animals are reared in vast warehouses by the hundreds, thousands, or even millions in intensive confinement. Chickens, cows, pigs, and others are crammed together in small cages or faeces-ridden sheds, transported in filthy trucks, and slaughtered on killing floors soaked with blood, urine, and other bodily fluids,” the release pointed out.

It further said, “Many animals are sold for fresh meat at live-animal markets in India, China, and other countries around the world. Pathogens flourish in such conditions, making crowded farms and live-animal markets breeding grounds for new strains of dangerous bacteria and viruses. Scientists, overwhelmingly, believe that the viruses that cause COVID-19 and SARS were transmitted to humans through China’s live-animal markets, while swine flu and bird flu regularly plague factory farms.”

PETA India’s motto reads that “animals are not ours to eat” and opposes speciesism, also notes that the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that 75 per cent of recent infectious diseases affecting humans began in animals.

–IANS

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