Queens Woman Wins ‘Outstanding PETA Activist’ Award

For Immediate Release:
December 29, 2020

Contact:
Megan Wiltsie 202-483-7382

For saving animals used for fur by leading protests against those still selling it and for saving chickens and other animals from live-animal markets by appealing to the operators for their lives, Bellerose resident Rachel Levy Ejsmont has won an Outstanding PETA Activist Award, an annual recognition of the top animal rights advocates across the country.

Ejsmont, originally from Canada, has been informing anyone passing by or thinking of entering Canada Goose since the brand opened its flagship store in SoHo that coyotes are caught in steel traps for the fur on the store’s coats and that gentle geese are killed for the feathers used to line the coats. This year, she also helped lead protests against Saks Fifth Avenue, one of the few New York department stores that still sells fur. She’s busy at local live-animal markets, too, persuading them to let her find homes for some of the animals slated for slaughter—including a turkey ahead of Thanksgiving and a duck ahead of Christmas—often in exchange for packages of vegan meat.

“Rachel Levy Ejsmont has meant the difference between life and death for animals in New York City’s filthy live-animal markets,” says PETA President Ingrid Newkirk. “PETA is cheering on her efforts to save these animals and her commitment to sticking up for every fox, coyote, and goose targeted by the fashion industry.”

Trapped coyotes can succumb to the elements, blood loss, infection, or attacks by predators before trappers return to shoot, bludgeon, or kill them in some other horrific way, and geese and ducks used for down are hung upside down, slashed across the throat, and dunked into scalding-hot defeathering tanks in slaughterhouses. Sick, stressed animals are confined to cramped, filthy cages in both fur factories and “wet markets,” posing a major health risk: COVID-19 originated in such a market, and a mutant strain of the novel coronavirus has spread from captive minks to humans.

Ejsmont is available for interviews. She will receive a framed certificate.

PETA’s motto is “Animals are not ours to experiment on, eat, wear, use for entertainment, or abuse in any other way,” and the group opposes speciesism, a human-supremacist worldview. For more information, please visit PETA.org or follow the group on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram.