Chicago

PETA to Launch Billboard Campaign Against Pig-Butchering Competition in Chicago

Animal rights group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals is planning to launch a billboard campaign to protest a pig-butchering culinary competition coming to Chicago this weekend.

The billboard features an image of PETA’s president Ingrid Newkirk, 67, posing nude and hanging between the bodies of slaughtered pigs, with the slogan “We’re all the same. Go vegan.”

A mobile billboard will also circle the Cochon555 event in the West Town neighborhood from 4 to 7:30 p.m. Sunday, PETA said in a release.

Taking place at the Morgan Manufacturing event space, Cochon555 features five chefs each cooking a “heritage breed pig” in a competition to be crowned the “Prince/Princess of Porc” by a vote from guests and judges.

"If most people stood inside a slaughterhouse, as I've done, and watched pigs lose their lives, they'd lose their appetite for these wonderful animals' flesh," Newkirk said in a statement. "PETA is urging people to reject events that depict violence and death to other living beings, whose flesh not only looks like ours but also tastes like ours, as casual entertainment and to choose vegan foods instead."

Sunday’s event is part of a tour taking place in 14 cities across the country, with tickets starting at $125 to benefit a charity organization that assists pig farmers.

"Cochon555’s mission is to support small and family farms that raise animals humanely and responsibly," the event's communications director Robert McKeown said in a statement. "Cochon555 believes in the choice of the consumer. Cochon555 believes in educating individuals so they can make choices in the most informed way possible. Cochon555 fully supports the right of any person to choose not to eat meat, but we also asks others to respect the rights of consumers who choose to enjoy safe, honest meats that have been raised with purpose and passion by family farmers.”

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