Did She Consent? PETA’s New Billboards Will Make You Rethink Your Thanksgiving Dinner

Ahead of Canada’s Thanksgiving on October 9, PETA is inviting Canadians to join in our “ThanksVegan” festivities by choosing a compassionate holiday feast. As a reminder that gentle, sensitive turkeys don’t want to be killed for a Thanksgiving meal, we’re placing billboards in three Canadian cities—Edmonton and Spruce Grove, Alberta, and London, Ontario—with the message “She Did Not Consent.”

Every year, Canadians kill and consume millions of turkeys for Thanksgiving. Before ending up on someone’s holiday plate, many of these birds endure short, miserable lives on farms, where workers cram them into dark sheds with barely any room to move. To prevent crowded turkeys from injuring each other—likely out of extreme stress—workers often cut off portions of the birds’ toes and upper beaks with hot blades.

‘She Did Not Consent’: Animal-Derived Products Are the Result of Sexual Assault

As PETA’s thought-provoking billboards point out, consent isn’t just a human issue. While investigating farms and slaughterhouses in the U.S., PETA eyewitnesses uncovered horrific abuse, including that workers sexually assaulted birds. In one instance, at a Butterball slaughterhouse, a PETA eyewitness documented that a worker shoved his finger into a turkey’s cloaca (vagina) for “fun” during a break while the slaughter line was stopped. During an investigation into Plainville Farms, which claims to provide a “stress-free” environment for turkeys, PETA’s eyewitness saw a worker pick up a hen by her injured neck and mimic sex acts with her before dropping her on the floor, kicking her, and leaving her to die.

On many farms, genetic manipulation—or causing turkeys to grow much larger than they ever would in nature—is standard practice. It leaves them unable to breed normally, so workers typically manually extract semen from the males and impregnate the females by repeated forced artificial insemination.

PETA’s “She Did Not Consent” turkey ads will be placed near popular grocery stores to urge shoppers to choose vegan options instead of cruelty.

Do Right by Turkeys This Thanksgiving

Turkeys are smart, loyal, and fiercely protective of their young. In nature, they spend their days caring for their loved ones, building nests, foraging for food, taking dust baths, grooming themselves, and roosting high in trees—all things they can’t do on farms that raise them for slaughter. Show turkeys and all our fellow sentient beings the empathy and respect they deserve this Thanksgiving by pledging to go vegan.