Hermès’ Newest Shareholder Is … PETA!

Stock Purchase Will Allow PETA to Push for an End to Exotic-Skins Sales From Inside the Corporation

For Immediate Release:
July 30, 2015

Contact:
Shakira Croce 202-483-7382

On the heels of a PETA exposé revealing that reptiles on a farm that supplies a Hermès-owned tannery are sawed open while they’re still alive, PETA became a shareholder of Hermès International on the Paris stock exchange to put pressure on the company to end its sale of alligator and crocodile skins, which are made into watch straps and bags.

“PETA’s investigation revealed that the grisly source of Hermès’ accessories are living, feeling animals, some of whom were painfully mutilated and left to die,” says PETA Executive Vice President Tracy Reiman. “PETA will be campaigning outside the company and, as a shareholder, also working from the inside to demand a ban on exotic animal–skin accessories, including crocodile-skin bags and alligator-skin watchbands.”

PETA, whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to wear,” obtained video footage from two farms that supply Hermès-owned tanneries—including Padenga Holdings Ltd. in Zimbabwe, a company that operates one of the largest Nile crocodile–farming operations in the world, and Lone Star Alligator Farms in Winnie, Texas. PETA’s exposé revealed that after a captive-bolt gun at Lone Star was believed to be malfunctioning, the manager told a worker to cut into hundreds of live and fully conscious alligators and try to dislocate their vertebrae and then shove a metal rod up their spinal columns. Some reptiles were writhing minutes after their necks were sawed open with a knife or box cutter in a crude attempt to slaughter them. The video also shows thousands of crocodiles crammed into concrete pits at a factory farm in Kariba, Zimbabwe.

For more information, please visit PETA.org.