PETA’s Furs Help Afghan Widows and Children

For Immediate Release:
May 25, 2021

Contact:
Brooke Rossi 202-483-7382

To help orphans, widows, and others in need get through long, snowy winters in Afghanistan, PETA has teamed up with Southfield-based Life for Relief and Development to distribute more than 150 fur coats—all donated to PETA by people who have had a change of heart about the ethics of wearing animals. More photos are available here.

“The steady stream of fur coats pouring into PETA offices shows that most people in America have stopped wearing fur,” says PETA President Ingrid Newkirk. “While PETA can’t bring back animals who were electrocuted, gassed, or even skinned alive to make coats, we can use the furs to help those with few options in life.”

“We appreciate the donation of fur coats PETA sent to Life for distribution in Afghanistan,” says Life for Relief and Development CEO Dr. Hany Saqr. “[T]he people receiving the coats are very thankful.”

The animal rights group notes that most animals used for fur spend their entire lives inside cramped cages on fur factory farms, where they frantically turn in circles, gnaw on the bars, and mutilate themselves out of severe psychological distress before they’re killed. Animals trapped in nature can suffer for days before trappers arrive to shoot them, bludgeon them to death, or kill them in some other violent way.

PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to wear”—opposes speciesism, a human-supremacist worldview. Its fur coat donation program also sends unwanted furs to people experiencing homelessness and wildlife rehabilitation programs (to be used as bedding for orphaned animals), as well as using them in informative displays.

For more information, please visit PETA.org or follow the group on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram.