RoyalShave Bans Badger-Hair Brushes After PETA Exposé
Brand’s Parent Company, Kugo, Joins Dozens of Others Opposed to Violently Killing Badgers for Shaving Brushes
For Immediate Release:
June 22, 2020
Contact:
Moira Colley 202-483-7382
Following a horrifying PETA video exposé of China’s badger-brush industry—and after pressure from PETA and nearly 110,000 of its supporters—Kugo, the parent company of RoyalShave, Pomades, and The Stache, has banned the sale of badger-hair shaving brushes. In thanks, PETA sent it a box of delicious vegan chocolates.
PETA Asia’s eyewitness investigation revealed that, in order to make brushes used for shaving, makeup, and paint, badgers are captured using snares and other cruel methods while others are bred and confined to small wire cages on farms before being violently killed. Workers on farms in China, the world’s top producer of badger hair, beat crying badgers over the head with anything that they could find, including a chair leg, before slitting their throats. One animal continued to move for a full minute after his throat had been cut.
“No decent person would want a gentle badger caged, beaten, and killed for their shaving brush,” says PETA Executive Vice President Tracy Reiman. “Kugo has won PETA kudos for giving kind consumers the cruelty-free personal-care products they want.”
Badgers are social animals who, in nature, construct elaborate underground burrow systems, some of which are centuries old and have been inhabited by many generations of the same badger clan. They are fastidious and have separate rooms for sleeping and giving birth as well as outside “bathroom” areas.
Procter & Gamble, the parent company of The Art of Shaving, was the first company to ban badger hair after the release of PETA Asia’s exposé, and nearly 100 brands have followed suit, including Olivina Men, Penhaligon’s, The New York Shaving Company, Beau Brummell, and Bonanza.
PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to abuse in any way” and which opposes speciesism, a human-supremacist worldview—is now calling on Mid Century Shaving to ban badger hair.
For more information, please visit PETA.org.
