Thousands of Someones Bludgeoned Into Somethings for Gucci, YSL, Others!

How Crocodiles and Pythons Become Purses and Shoes

It’s filth and barbarism, not “luxury.”

PETA Asia’s investigators got inside two massive python factory farms that supply skins to Caravel, a tannery owned by Kering, the parent company of Gucci, Yves Saint Laurent, Bottega Veneta, and other brands. One of these operations estimated that it had 15,000 pythons at the time of the investigation.

Workers pinned struggling pythons by the neck and smashed them over the head with a hammer before driving metal hooks through their heads. To make the skins easier to remove, they inflated the snakes with water – even as the pythons continued to move. Dr Clifford Warwick, a reptile expert who reviewed PETA Asia’s new video footage, says it’s likely that most of the snakes were conscious during this excruciatingly painful process.

Disgusting, Not Desirable

PETA Asia’s investigators also visited a farm that confines thousands of crocodiles to pits filled with fetid green water. Workers there used metal blades to crudely hack into crocodiles’ necks – and one crocodile continued to move for more than 20 minutes while being skinned alive. Stabbing crocodiles in the neck severs or badly damages their spinal cord, causing paralysis and likely extreme pain but not death, according to Dr Warwick. Crocodiles may remain alive for more than 90 minutes after this horror.

Previous investigations by PETA entities have shown lizards struggling as workers repeatedly hacked at their necks with machetes and alligators flailing and kicking for minutes after workers tried to kill them.

Animals’ Skin Belongs Only to Them

Dozens of studies show that reptiles experience “anxiety, stress, distress, excitement, fear, frustration, pain, and suffering.” Mother pythons carefully hide their eggs if they can and stay at their nest for months until the eggs hatch, keeping them warm by continually contracting their muscles. Crocodiles have such a varied vocabulary – they communicate through hisses, growls, bellows, and coughs as well as by spouting water and blowing bubbles – that researchers in Australia are trying to create a crocodile dictionary.