Chrissie Hynde: ‘The animal you’re eating wanted his life just as much as you want yours’

Chrissie Hynde has gotta have some of your attention, Pompey! As she prepares to kick off The Pretenders’ 2024 UK tour in Portsmouth today, the iconic lead vocalist and longtime PETA patron has delivered a message of love on behalf of animals to the city – which is packed with more burger joints per capita than nearly anywhere else in the country. The billboard urges viewers to face reality and recognise that vulnerable animals are killed for the meat they eat.

“The animal you’re eating wanted his life just as much as you want yours,” says Hynde. “Don’t pretend any different!”

“Behind every burger is a once-living being who felt pain and fear, valued their life, and didn’t want to be ground up and turned into meat any more than you or I would,” adds PETA Vice President of Programmes Elisa Allen.

Each year, millions of cows are hauled to abattoirs, where workers shoot them in the head with a captive-bolt gun, hang them up by one leg, and cut their throat – sometimes while they’re still conscious.

Many restaurants today have vegan burgers on the menu, and supermarket shelves are packed with succulent patties that are good for animals and our taste buds, including THIS Isn’t Beef burgers, Co-op GRO’s The Incredible Burger, and Meatless Farm’s plant-based burgers.

PETA – whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to eat” – opposes speciesism, a human-supremacist worldview.