Media Invitation: Meet Photogenic Chinchillas, Just Arrived From First-Ever Fur-Farm Rescue, Now up for Adoption
For Immediate Release:
August 22, 2014
Contact:
Katie MacDonald 202-483-7382
PETA, whose motto includes “animals are not ours to wear,” has just closed one of the largest chinchilla breeding and fur farms in California: Valley View Chinchilla Ranch, which described itself as a breeder of “pets”—despite electrocuting and skinning chinchillas who didn’t sell or “work out” as companions and then selling the pelts so that they could be made into bedspreads, coats, and scarves.
After spending long hours removing more than 400 chinchillas from their barren steel isolation cages, which were crushed for scrap to prevent their reuse, and helping set the chinchillas up in their temporary new home at the San Diego Humane Society and SPCA, PETA employees traveled back to PETA’s Norfolk headquarters with a pair of chinchillas. We’d like to invite you to meet the chinchillas before they find their new home:
When: August 25 at noon
Where: PETA’s Sam Simon Center, 501 Front St., Norfolk
“PETA stepped in to save these fascinating animals from being painfully electrocuted and to make sure that no coats or blankets would be made from their fur,” says Sam Simon, the Simpsons co-creator who was on hand for the rescue and after whom PETA’s headquarters is named. “PETA encourages everyone to help animals like these little individuals by never buying or wearing any animal skins.”
Video footage of Valley View, now available at PETA.org, shows that the farm used a toe-to-ear electrocution slaughtering method, deemed “unacceptable” by the American Veterinary Medical Association, that causes animals to experience all the pain of a full-blown heart attack before dying. The owners never provided chinchillas with veterinary care, and the highly social animals—who live in herds of up to 100 and enjoy burrowing and climbing—were locked in filthy, virtually barren cages and often in solitary confinement. The chinchillas will now be adopted out in pairs and groups to guardians who will be taught proper chinchilla care.
