Bryan Adams has a message for the Canadian Armed Forces: Lose the bearskin caps. In a new video for PETA, the “Summer of ’69” hitmaker and officer of the Order of Canada reveals how bears endure agonizing, prolonged deaths so their fur can be used to make the purely ornamental headpieces.
As PETA’s investigative footage shows, recreational hunters in Ontario deliberately bait the animals with buckets of smelly, greasy food and shoot them with crossbows before disemboweling and dismembering them. Wounded bears don’t always die right away. Desperate and in pain, some of then flee the hunters and endure a slow, painful death from infection or blood loss. Nursing mothers are sometimes shot and killed, too, leaving behind cubs who starve, unable to survive on their own.
No Cap, Bears Aren’t Trophies: Join Bryan Adams and Help Bears
Hunters often keep bears’ body parts as trophies and sell their skin to buyers, including the cap makers who use them to make ceremonial headgear, like the hats worn by members of the Canadian Armed Forces and the King’s Guard in the U.K. It takes the skin of at least one bear to make a single military cap.
Thankfully, there’s a animal-free way to make caps: State-of-the-art faux fur developed by PETA U.K. and luxury faux furrier ECOPEL has been shown in tests to mimic real bear fur in both appearance and performance—meaning that there’s absolutely no excuse for the Canadian Armed Forces or the King’s Guard to use hats made of the fur of slaughtered bears.
Join Bryan Adams, a prolific songwriter who’s a longtime vegan, in urging the Canadian government to end the cruelty and go fur-free: