New Alec Baldwin Video Calls On Parents to Shun Baby Bear-Cub Petting at North Carolina Roadside Zoo

For Immediate Release:
July 8, 2022

Contact:
Robin Goist 202-483-7382

With summer tourism season underway, today PETA is releasing a video narrated by Alec Baldwin exposing the suffering of baby bears used in paid cub-petting “encounters” and appealing to families never to patronize any operation that tears cubs away from their mothers and treats them as photo props—which is what local roadside zoo Cherokee Bear Zoo does.

“These events are part of an industry dependent on destroying families,” Baldwin explains. “Each cub is an infant who writhes and cries when torn from their adoring mother and denied that crucial bond.”

The new video shows exactly that.

Other offenders include Yellowstone Bear World in Rexburg, Idaho—where bear cubs have been observed crying, struggling to escape being passed around like toys, and lying limp with apparent exhaustion and from overheating—and Oswald’s Bear Ranch in Newberry, Michigan. More than a dozen cubs have died on Oswald’s watch—two of them, Peanut and Pink String, died last year when they were only a few months old.

“My family won’t visit any facility that tears bear cubs from their mothers for entertainment,” concludes Baldwin. “Please … ask your families to boycott these facilities, too.”

PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to use for entertainment”—opposes speciesism, a human-supremacist worldview. For more information, please visit PETA.org or follow the group on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram.