"PETA campaign director Bruce Friedrich said that the point of the ad is to remind people that animals experience the same pain and suffering as humans."

No, they don't.
The insane sociopathic insistence on equating the highly sophisticated developed human nervous system with that of primitive animals and insects is why PETA will always be disregarded as extremist lunatics.

While I am sure a pig experiences trauma and panic during the act of slaughter, how can you compare what a pig brain experiences to what the human brain is capable of experiencing? Our "intelligence" is merely a product of our minds having a greater capacity to perceive and understand our environment and our experiences - good or bad. How can any compassionate person compare what an animal feels right before the blade drops in a slaughter house, to what a murdered young woman must have felt during her the events leading up to her death (first the abduction, the fear, the dread, wondering if she will ever see her loved ones again...knowing her fate the entire time before her murder... ). It's absolutely sickening that peta would trivialize and dehumanize her very human emotions by comparing them to the instinctual reactions produced by a briefly traumatized pig.

Sometimes I really believe these PETA people don't love animals, they simply hate other humans. They just can't understand why people hold human beings in higher regard to pigs and ants. I almost feel sorry for them, until they pull a stunt like this that is so sickening that I am reminded how their presence is so deleterious to the world.