Omaha-Based Beauty-Product Retailer Bans Badger-Hair Items After PETA Exposé

LovelySkin Joins Chorus of Those Opposed to Trapping and Violently Killing Badgers for Shaving Brushes

For Immediate Release:
October 15, 2018

Contact:
Moira Colley 202-483-7382

After PETA shared a horrifying video exposé of China’s badger-brush industry with LovelySkin, the beauty-product retailer—which sells hundreds of cosmetics brands online and at its Omaha spa—banned badger hair. In thanks, PETA is sending the company a box of delicious vegan chocolates.

PETA Asia’s eyewitness investigation revealed that in order to make brushes used for shaving, makeup, and paint, protected badgers are captured using snares and other cruel methods while others are bred and confined to small wire cages on farms before being violently killed. On Chinese badger-hair farms, many animals exhibit behavior patterns indicative of a severe psychological disorder, and on one farm, a badger was missing a leg, which the farm owner attributed to a fight with another one caged nearby. Slaughterhouse workers beat crying badgers over the head with anything that they could find, including a chair leg, before slitting their throats. One animal continued to move for a full minute after his throat had been cut.

“Every badger-hair brush represents the miserable death of a sensitive animal,” says PETA Director of Corporate Affairs Anne Brainard. “By joining PETA’s list of retailers that don’t sell badger hair, LovelySkin will help prevent badgers from going insane inside tiny cages and being beaten to death for makeup and shaving brushes.”

Badgers are extremely social animals who, in nature, construct elaborate underground burrow systems, some of which are centuries old and have been inhabited by many generations of the same badger clan. They are fastidious and have separate rooms for sleeping and giving birth as well as designated outside “bathroom” areas.

Procter & Gamble, the parent company of The Art of Shaving, was the first company to ban badger-hair items after the release of PETA’s video, and numerous others have followed suit, including Olivina Men, The New York Shaving Company, Beau Brummell, and Bonanza, among others. PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to abuse in any way”—is now calling on Baxter of California and Dick Blick Art Materials to follow suit.

For more information, please visit PETA.org.