PETA Activist Denied Opportunity to Speak to Louis Vuitton Execs at Annual Meeting

Update: Upon arriving at LVMH’s annual meeting, PETA’s representative was refused entrance to the main meeting room and denied the opportunity to ask board members a question about the company’s appalling use of exotic-animal skins. Companies will go to great lengths to avoid confrontation about the suffering that animals endure at their hands. Although PETA is disappointed by LVMH’s rebuff, we remain steadfast in our efforts to advocate for change.

Originally posted on April 13, 2017:

At LVMH’s annual meeting, a PETA representative will urge Louis Vuitton’s parent company to stop selling bags and other items made from the skins of crocodiles and ostriches. The meeting will take place at 10 a.m. tomorrow at the Carrousel du Louvre in Paris.

In order to advocate for change, PETA bought a stake in LVMH after last year’s exposé of crocodile farms in Vietnam—including two that have supplied skins to a tannery owned by the company—revealed that reptiles are cut apart while still alive and thrashing in agony. Video footage also showed that thousands of crocodiles are confined to concrete cages, some narrower than the length of their own bodies, and that workers ram metal rods down their spines as blood pours from their wounds.

“Every PETA exposé of the exotic-skins industry has found sensitive living beings crammed into filthy pits, hacked apart, and left to die,” says PETA President Ingrid Newkirk. “From demonstrating on the street to speaking up in the boardroom, PETA will push LVMH to stop selling any bag, watchband, or shoe made from a reptile’s skin.”

PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to wear”—also obtained eyewitness footage last year showing that ostriches, who are used for the bumpy-textured or “goose bump” skin purses sold by LVMH and other designer brands, are kept in barren dirt feedlots before being trucked to slaughterhouses. Once there, workers forcibly restrain birds on the kill floor, electrically stun them, and then slit their throats in full view of their terrified flockmates.

What You Can Do

PETA has exposed cruelty at reptile farms on three continents, and the story is always the same: grim, close confinement and a violent death. Before buying items made with exotic skins like these, please stop and think of the animals they come from and their intense suffering. Don’t support this cruelty with your purchases.