"School's out for summer. School's out with fever"
Announcement posted by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) Australia 22 Apr 2020
The Editor,
"School's out for summer. School's out with fever."
Do you think Alice Cooper knew his 70s rock song about holidays would be so relevant in 2020? Thankfully, unlike the song, school is not out "forever". In the Northern Territory, schools will re-open from April 29, and in New South Wales, Premier Gladys Berejiklian announced that students could begin attending school in person from May 11. Other states may soon follow.
Clearly, the school experience won't snap right back to "normal". We can, and should, use this change as a chance to question certain "normalities" that may not have served us well. After months of global suffering and tens of thousands of deaths, let’s reject suffering and death when it comes to the foods that we eat by providing tasty, climate-friendly, and cruelty-free vegan foods in all school tuck-shops and canteens.
Whenever animals are cooped up in fetid feedlots, crammed in cramped barns, or shot imprecisely in a field and transported in unrefrigerated trucks (as people do to kangaroos), we create breeding grounds for new strains of bacteria and viruses. While we are still learning the origin of COVID-19, we know that diseases such as swine flu and bird flu originated on factory farms. Why would we put ourselves at risk of a new—and even more devastating—virus, when we could easily thrive on vegan foods? In coming weeks, when Australia's kids return to school, let's keep a new "ABC" in the forefront of their minds, and appetites: Always Be Compassionate.
Mimi Bekhechi
Campaigns Strategist
People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals
PO Box 20308 World Square
Sydney, NSW, 2002
(08) 8556-5828
"School's out for summer. School's out with fever."
Do you think Alice Cooper knew his 70s rock song about holidays would be so relevant in 2020? Thankfully, unlike the song, school is not out "forever". In the Northern Territory, schools will re-open from April 29, and in New South Wales, Premier Gladys Berejiklian announced that students could begin attending school in person from May 11. Other states may soon follow.
Clearly, the school experience won't snap right back to "normal". We can, and should, use this change as a chance to question certain "normalities" that may not have served us well. After months of global suffering and tens of thousands of deaths, let’s reject suffering and death when it comes to the foods that we eat by providing tasty, climate-friendly, and cruelty-free vegan foods in all school tuck-shops and canteens.
Whenever animals are cooped up in fetid feedlots, crammed in cramped barns, or shot imprecisely in a field and transported in unrefrigerated trucks (as people do to kangaroos), we create breeding grounds for new strains of bacteria and viruses. While we are still learning the origin of COVID-19, we know that diseases such as swine flu and bird flu originated on factory farms. Why would we put ourselves at risk of a new—and even more devastating—virus, when we could easily thrive on vegan foods? In coming weeks, when Australia's kids return to school, let's keep a new "ABC" in the forefront of their minds, and appetites: Always Be Compassionate.
Mimi Bekhechi
Campaigns Strategist
People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals
PO Box 20308 World Square
Sydney, NSW, 2002
(08) 8556-5828