Sunny Leone is PETA’s Person of The Year

Earlier this year, Leone starred in a PETA ad campaign in which she encouraged fans to “be an angel” by adopting a homeless dog. She also put her money where her mouth is by helping PETA find a home for a puppy who had been abandoned during the monsoon.

She has also gone vegetarian, saying, “I have seen things I can’t erase from my mind which made me stop eating meat”.

“Sunny Leone’s kindness proves she is as beautiful on the inside as she is on the outside”, says Sachin Bangera, PETA’s associate director of celebrity and public relations. “PETA is calling on people everywhere to follow her compassionate example by adopting– and never buying–companion animals and by eating healthy, plant-based meals that save animals every time we sit down to eat.”

Across India, stray dogs and cats struggle to survive on the streets. PETA – whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to abuse in any way” – notes that many of them go hungry or are injured in fights, hit by vehicles, or abused. Countless others are left to languish in animal shelters because there aren’t enough good homes for them. People can bring joy into the life of a homeless dog or cat – and into their own lives – by adopting a lovable and loving homeless animal.

Leone knows it’s also vital to combat the root cause of animal homelessness, which is why she appeared in another PETA ad next to the words “Birth Control! Dogs Need It, Too. Sterilise Your Dogs and Cats”.”I believe that every single dog should be spayed and neutered”, she says. “You don’t want to continue the cycle of homeless dogs or cats. And spaying and neutering also keeps them healthy. It prevents them from having different diseases that they can get if they’re not.”

As seen in PETA’s exposé “Glass Walls“, in today’s industrialised meat industries, chickens’ throats are cut while they’re still conscious, fish suffocate or are cut open while they’re still alive, and pigs are often stabbed in the heart as they scream in pain.

At the slaughterhouse, animals are often killed in full view of one another and dismembered while they’re still conscious.

Past recipients of PETA’s Person of the Year Award include Dr Shashi Tharoor, former Supreme Court Justice KS Panicker Radhakrishnan, and actors Kapil Sharma, Hema Malini, R Madhavan, and Jacqueline Fernandez.