Kering Shareholder Plays Appalling Python-Slaughter Video at Annual Meeting, Increasing Pressure Over Reptile-Skin Sales

For Immediate Release:
April 25, 2024

Contact:
Moira Colley 202-483-7382

At Kering’s annual meeting today, a representative of PETA—which owns stock in the company—hammered chairman and CEO François-Henri Pinault with a request to cut ties with the vile reptile-skin industry before showing video footage from the most recent PETA Asia investigation into farms in Thailand that supply snakeskin to Kering-owned tannery Caravel. The investigation is just the latest to uncover appalling cruelty at the brand’s reptile-skin suppliers, including workers pinning pythons down by the neck, bashing them in the head with a hammer, punching metal hooks through their heads, and inflating their bodies with water—even as the animals continued to move.

“There’s nothing luxurious about hacking up terrified and struggling pythons just for a few bags and belts,” says PETA President Ingrid Newkirk. “PETA is calling on Kering to get out of the disgusting reptile-skin business and switch to the cruelty-free vegan materials that compassionate consumers demand.”

PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to wear”—points out that Every Animal Is Someone and offers free Empathy Kits for people who need a lesson in kindness. For more information, please visit PETA.org or follow the group on X, Facebook, or Instagram.

PETA’s shareholder question follows.

A recent PETA Asia investigation uncovered appalling cruelty at farms in Thailand supplying snake skins to Caravel, a Kering-owned tannery.

Emaciated and sick pythons—one whose eyes were grotesquely bulging from their sockets—were housed in boxes and cages so filthy and lived under such deprived conditions that a reptile expert characterized their treatment as inhumane. Workers bashed pythons in the head with hammers, impaled them on hooks, pumped their bodies full of water as they continued to move, and then skinned them.

This may feel like déjà vu. That’s because—despite Kering’s grand claims about animal welfare—nothing has changed. In 2015, Gucci was implicated in PETA’s investigation into the two largest ostrich-slaughter companies in the world, and the brand was again implicated in PETA Asia’s 2021 investigation into an Indonesian slaughterhouse where workers decapitated and dismembered lizards with machetes.

Gen Zers and millennials are driving today’s fashion movements, and they want sustainable and cruelty-free luxury. The luxury vegan handbags market alone is projected to more than double its value by 2030.

Given the desire for cruelty-free, sustainable luxury goods and the abhorrent torture and slaughter inherent in the factory farming of pythons, lizards, and other animals used for exotic skins, why won’t our company put stock in the wishes of its customers by washing its hands of this vile industry?