No, that isn’t hyperbole, it’s how PETA describes its own billboard trucks:

“Hell on Wheels”—PETA’s hyper-realistic pig transport truck that looks as if it contains real pigs on their way to slaughter—will bombard them with actual recorded sounds of the animals’ panicked screams, along with a subliminal message every 10 seconds suggesting that people go vegan.

There’s a PETA billboard truck for chickens as well, which showed up in my town a few days ago, and it too has “a subliminal message every 10 seconds.”

Now the folliwing is easier for me to say because I’m no fan of PETA and I don’t think that factory-farm conditions, as shocking as they are, are worse than the extinction of the chicken, cow, and pig species. (PETA is both against pet ownership and for “euthanizing” wild or stray cats, and they employ similar logic to every animal species they claim to defend…)

…where was I? Oh, yeah, fuck subliminal advertising.

There’s some scientific debate on subliminal advertising’s effecttiveness, but intent matters. And PETA didn’t want to rely on convincing people of factory farming’s cruelty or shocking people with (in this case) a loop of distorted sound that they say is supposed to be chickens in pain. No, they wanted to slide their message directly into the backbrains of passersby, and that attempt at low-rent brainwashing earns them whatever amount of scorn they hadn’t earned already.

P.S. I’m pretty sure that PETA is using billboard trucks instead of more far-reaching forms of advertising because the FCC talks about “subliminal perception techniques” in a way that makes mass-media platforms wary of selling them ad space.