Rite Aid Pulls Great Ape Greeting Cards From Shelves Following PETA Push

For Immediate Release:
March 18, 2021

Contact:
Moira Colley 202-483-7382

After learning from PETA that greeting cards featuring great apes wearing costumes, displayed in studios, or interacting with humans hinder conservation efforts, Rite Aid is pulling all such cards from its 2,450 stores and will no longer feature great apes in its advertising.

“Kudos to Rite Aid for helping PETA push Hallmark and American Greetings to stop exploiting apes for their cards,” says PETA primatologist Julia Gallucci. “Chimpanzees aren’t models or props, and clownish photos of them wearing clothes or sitting at desks put these endangered animals at risk.”

Emmy Award–winning wildlife documentary producer Chris Palmer (who has written two books on the ethics of photographing wild animals) also sent a letter on PETA’s behalf to Joe Arcuri, the CEO of American Greetings, explaining that unnatural images of chimpanzees mislead consumers into believing that the species—which may face extinction within our lifetime—is thriving. These portrayals may also increase the black market demand for endangered great apes as “pets,” which is one of the main forces driving them toward extinction.

For all these reasons, greeting card company Moonpig has dropped all images of captive great apes from its products, and top stock-image agencies such as Getty Images, Shutterstock, and Dreamstime are banning inappropriate images of nonhuman primates.

PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to use in entertainment”—opposes speciesism, a human-supremacist worldview. For more information, please visit PETA.org or follow the group on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram.