Donald Trump Jr. got into trouble a few years ago when a photo of him holding a severed elephant tail surfaced online. The photo, which is from a hunting trip to Africa Don Jr. made with his brother Eric, is now being used to both publicly shame the President’s son and serve as marketing for PETA—the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals organization—which used the photo to adorn a billboard in Texas, near the U.S.-Mexico border.
According to PETA, the motive for this call to action against the unnecessary killing of animals, is to remind people, “about the presence of the real ‘undesirables’ much closer to home.” The organization reportedly plans to put these billboards in El Paso and Laredo, Texas—both of which are border towns. In case you forgot about the infamous photo, here’s PETA’s new billboard in question.
As you can see, the billboard urges citizens to “Deport Callous Cheating Opportunists Now!” The line beneath in small-print, seemingly wants to remind people that Donald Trump Jr., who finds pleasure in traveling across the globe to kill animals not posing as an immediate threat to his well-being, is the undesirable in question. The PETA blog is taking advantage of this new stunt to employ readers to take action against the ever-increasing extinction rates of certain animals, such as the Tasmanian tiger and the great auk. The embedded Tweet, unfortunately, reveals that the dentist who killed Cecil the lion caused the animal to suffer for an astonishing 12 hours before he died.
Regarding Don Jr. and Eric Trump’s 2012 trip to the African continent to hunt and kill a wide variety of animals, PETA released the following statement soon after the event was made public: “If the young Trumps are looking for a thrill, perhaps they should consider skydiving, bungee jumping, or even following in their anti-hunting father’s footsteps and taking down competing businesses—not wild animals.” Ouch. Presumably, Donald Trump Jr. has always wanted to see himself on a giant poster or billboard—but this is definitely not what he had in mind.