Just in time for Easter, Babe star James Cromwell is hitting the airwaves in some of the country’s most “Bible-minded” cities to encourage Christians to celebrate a ham-free Easter.
The PETA radio spot will run this week in Chattanooga, Tennessee; Asheville and Charlotte, North Carolina; Birmingham, Alabama; Lexington, Kentucky; and Roanoke, Virginia.
“When I made the movie Babe, I learned how smart and sensitive pigs are,” Cromwell says in the spot. “I developed a lot of respect for them and stopped eating them. Won’t you join me in bagging the bacon and giving ham the old heave-ho this Easter?”
“Pigs are just as intelligent and loving as dogs are, yet they’re mutilated and killed in horrible ways by the millions every year,” says PETA Vice President Colleen O’Brien. “PETA encourages everyone to celebrate a merciful Easter with delicious vegan meals.”
PETA notes that pigs killed for food spend their entire lives confined to filthy warehouses. Mother pigs are often kept in metal crates so small that they can’t even turn around, and piglets’ teeth, tails, and testicles are cut off, often without any painkillers. At slaughterhouses, pigs are hung upside down and bled to death, frequently while they’re still conscious.
PETA — whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to eat” — is also running the radio spot in Los Angeles, Miami, and New York.
