Opposition to Cruelty to Crocodiles Heads to Louis Vuitton’s Boardroom
PETA Purchases Stock in Retailer’s Parent Company to Push for an End to Exotic-Skin Sales From Inside the Corporation
For Immediate Release:
January 12, 2017
Contact:
Sophia Charchuk 202-483-7382
After a PETA exposé revealed that crocodiles on factory farms in Vietnam—including two that have supplied skins to a tannery owned by Louis Vuitton‘s parent company, LVMH—are confined to tiny pits and cut apart while they’re still alive and thrashing, the group has become a shareholder of LVMH on the Euronext Paris in order to pressure the company to stop selling bags and other merchandise made from exotic skins.
“Every PETA exposé of the exotic-skins industry has found that sensitive living beings are crammed into filthy pits and hacked apart while still alive,” says PETA President Ingrid Newkirk. “From street demonstrations to the boardroom, PETA will push LVMH to stop selling bags, watchbands, and shoes made from a reptile’s skin.”
PETA’s exposé, which has been viewed more than 30 million times, reveals that at the two farms that have supplied LVMH, reptiles lay motionless in thousands of tiny concrete cells, some shorter than their own bodies, for 15 months before finally being slaughtered. Others were jam-packed by the dozens into barren concrete pits. At another farm, workers hacked into thrashing crocodiles’ necks and rammed metal rods down their spines as blood poured from the wounds, and one crocodile is shown still moving after being skinned. This killing method has long been shown to be inhumane, and experts have found that crocodilians remain conscious for over an hour after their spinal cord has been severed and their blood vessels cut.
PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to wear”—has exposed cruelty on reptile farms on three continents (Africa, Asia, and North America) and each time has shown that these intelligent, sensitive animals endure squalid imprisonment and a violent death.
For more information, please visit PETA.org.
