Ensnared in a fishing net and swishing a mermaid tail that matches her signature sea-blue hair, ARCH ENEMY vocalist Alissa White-Gluz is putting herself in the place of aquatic animals in a new PETA campaign launching in time for Lent. “It’s a reminder that fish are not swimming potatoes — they’re sensitive individuals who deserve to be left off people’s plates all 40 days of Lent and beyond”.

“The first thing that people are ready to … disregard as living animals are sea creatures,” says White-Gluz in an exclusive video interview. “We’re … invading a completely different environment and just destroying all the inhabitants in it … That’s something less talked about, but it should really be talked about, especially when you look at the statistics that say that our oceans will be dead 20 years from now.”

Fish feel pain, share knowledge, have long memories, and have cultural traditions. Some woo potential partners by creating intricate works of art in the sand on the ocean floor, yet more fish are killed for food each year than all other animals combined. They’re impaled, crushed, suffocated, or cut open and gutted — often while they’re completely conscious. In addition, 38 million tons of other aquatic animals are unintentionally caught each year to satisfy consumers’ demand for “seafood.”

But White-Gluz points out that hope isn’t lost if everyone goes vegan, as she did over 20 years ago. Each person who follows her lead can expect to save nearly 200 animals each year and, as she notes, help tackle the cruel egg and dairy industries. “By making that simple choice, we actually could reverse this damage,” she says.

White-Gluz joins a long list of musicians — including her boyfriend Doyle Wolfgang Von Frankenstein (MISFITS),Cristina Scabbia (LACUNA COIL),Dave Navarro (JANE’S ADDICTION),Ozzy Osbourne, Davey Havok (AFI) and Iggy Pop — who have teamed up with PETA to promote kindness to animals.

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

For more information, visit PETA.org.

Last year, during a question-and-answer session at the Wacken Open Air festival in Wacken, Germany, White-Gluz was asked if it’s difficult for her to maintain her lifestyle while she is on tour. She responded: “It super easy, actually, because I still party; I just don’t intoxicate myself when I do it. But if other people wanna do that, that’s their choice — it’s up to them. Smoking, I’d like them to stay away ’cause I don’t wanna breathe that in. But otherwise, it’s really, really easy, actually. It’s not even something that I think about. And actually, we have… In our tour bus, in our band and crew, I’m not the only sober one and I’m not the only vegan either, so I’m surrounded by a lot of different kinds of people and we all get along beautifully.”

Two years earlier, White-Gluz explained why being vegan is definitely metal, telling the Mercy For Animals Facebook page: “So, I’ve been vegan for over 20 years now. I was vegan before I ever started in music. I’ve never eaten meat in my life. I grew up in a completely vegetarian household, so going vegan was just like the logical next step. And when I started doing music, there was nothing that I wanted to talk about more than animal rights. And so I was now using this heavy, passionate form of music to sort of convey a message that I wanted to. When I’m screaming in my band, I feel like I’m screaming for the voiceless. And I can’t imagine being that loud if I had nothing to say.

“Being female, being vegan and also being straight edge in the metal world is just a combination of targets on my forehead that make it really easy for me to get singled out or pushed around,” she continued. “But those are just things that are so much a part of who I am that I couldn’t change them even if I wanted to. And I wouldn’t — I wouldn’t change for anyone.

“In my opinion, metal is all about rebellion — it’s about carving your own path, thinking against what everyone’s trying to make you think,” Alissa added. “And veganism is the ultimate form of rebellion, because you are literally taking things that people have told you are normal that deep down inside you don’t think are normal that you’ve been conditioned to accept about your day-to-day tasks, like eating or what you wear or what you choose to buy. Everyone says that that’s normal, that you need to exploit other living beings for those things, but you don’t. And so taking a stand against that is what veganism is. And that is really metal.”