Dolce & Gabbana Under Fire After Video Shows Minks Suffering on Squalid Farms

New PETA Exposé Reveals Pools of Waste Crawling With Maggots on Canadian Mink Farms

For Immediate Release:
March 13, 2018

Contact:
Audrey Shircliff 202-483-7382

Armed with a new PETA exposé that shows minks living in misery on five Canadian mink farms, PETA is calling on Dolce & Gabbana—which sells mink bags, shoes, and coats, among other fur items—to join Giorgio Armani, Jimmy Choo, Gucci, Michael Kors, and dozens of other top designers and brands in banning fur.

PETA’s exposé, created from footage captured by an eyewitness named Malcolm Klimowicz, reveals that minks on these farms are crammed into small cages with wire floors that dig into their feet. Cobwebs and rust cover their cages, while heaps of excrement and pools of waste infested with maggots decay below them. The severe crowding leads to fighting, injury, and even death. Several minks were missing ears, one animal’s head had an open sore on it, and others had to climb over the decomposing body of a dead cagemate.

“When so many designers and brands, including Giorgio Armani, Gucci, and Michael Kors, are embracing warm and stylish animal-free options, it’s unconscionable for Dolce & Gabbana to keep clinging to animal fur,” says PETA Executive Vice President Tracy Reiman. “PETA’s latest exposé shows once again that fur coats, collars, and cuffs sentence sensitive animals to a miserable life inside fur farms’ tiny, filthy wire cages.”

PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to wear”—notes that minks are solitary, semiaquatic animals who can occupy thousands of acres of wetland habitat in the wild. But on fur farms, they’re confined to severely crowded cages without adequate space to groom, eliminate, nest, care for their young, and rest. PETA’s exposé shows that minks frantically pace back and forth, while others gnaw on the rusty wires of the cages—signs of zoochosis, or captivity-induced insanity.

For more information, please visit PETA.org.