One Direction’s Work With Negligent Animal Exhibitor Prompts ‘Hollywood Reporter’ Ad

Full-Page PETA Ad Reveals Great Apes Forced Into Performing and Left to Languish in Squalid Roadside Zoos

For Immediate Release:
October 29, 2014

Contact:
Moira Colley 202-483-7382

One Direction’s controversial decision to use exotic animals in the video for “Steal My Girl” has prompted PETA to take out a full-page ad in The Hollywood Reporter. The ad (available here) will run in the November 5 issue and proclaims, “No Animals Were Harmed? Really, One Direction?” and goes on to reveal that wild animals used in film and television are routinely beaten, shocked, and deprived of food during training. A stark photograph reveals what happens by the time chimpanzees are approximately 8 years old, when they are too strong to be safely handled—they end up like Chubbs, who appeared in Tim Burton’s Planet of the Apes and was last seen languishing in a dank concrete cell in a roadside zoo.

“PETA’s ad reminds Hollywood what it won’t see on set—that baby apes are torn away from their mothers at birth, abused during training, and then discarded at decrepit facilities,” says PETA Foundation Deputy General Counsel Delcianna Winders. “It’s up to producers, directors, and performers to protect wild animals by refusing to work with them, period.”

Both PETA and PETA U.K.—whose mottos read, in part, that “animals are not ours to use for entertainment”—contacted One Direction to ask the group to cut the scenes featuring exotic animals from the video, explaining how animals suffer in the entertainment industry and revealing the history of Steve Martin, the exhibitor hired for “Steal My Girl.” Martin’s violations of the federal Animal Welfare Act include locking apes in barren cages for up to 18 hours a day, and he has discarded unwanted wild animals by posting ads in dubious animal-trade publications and dumping them at roadside zoos. Two of the chimpanzees he used ended up at the notorious Garold Wayne Interactive Zoological Park. Martin’s history is the norm among animal exhibitors.

For more information, please visit peta2.com.