TOW #10 (Visual Text Analysis) Why love one but eat the other?

      The highway is a great place for advertisers to send a message in the form of billboards. As drivers speed down the unchanging road, these large billboards can't help but grab drivers' attention. Usually, from my experience, most of these billboards are to sell products or tell us of an upcoming restaurant. However this billboard by the non-profit organization, Mercy for Animals, speaks for a more humanitarian cause, using cuteness and a simple layout to persuade people to be vegetarians.
       There is no doubt that the two animals on the left of the billboard are extremely cute. The large pictures of the piglet and the puppy elicit a strong emotional attachment to the billboard which allows the billboard to hook its audience and relay its message. A pink piglet with almond black eyes and a sad looking puppy with droopy ears can't help but quickly stir the feeling of drivers and bring out the occasional, "aw, how cute." The cuteness grabs the attention and moves on to its true purpose.
       Unlike some of the other visual texts I have analyzed, which require quite a bit of time to extract the purpose and devices, this billboard was simple, allowing the viewers to completely digest the message. Since drivers are at the most spending a couple of seconds on the billboard, it is necessary that the format is simple, and since Americans are bound to read things left to right because of the English language, there is a specific order to which the elements of the billboard are to be viewed. On the left are the two cute little animals and next to that is the rhetorical question, "why love one but eat the other?" Then the billboard moves on to the answer, "choose vegetarian." If you couldn't answer the question then it makes sense to choose vegetarian because why would you want to turn that cute little piglet into roasted suckling? Then on the very bottom is the logo of the organization, establishing the ethos in the matter. The simple format and the organized mixture of pathos, logos, and ethos allow the billboard to efficiently and effectively persuade its audience to go vegetarian.