STATEMENT: PETA Lawsuit Upheld Over Strange and Cruel Opossum Drop

For Immediate Release:
December 13, 2013

This afternoon, Wake County Superior Court Judge Allen Baddour denied a motion filed by the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission (WRC) to dismiss a lawsuit brought by PETA and several North Carolina citizens that seeks to stop an illegal permit from being issued to allow a wild opossum to be suspended alive in a Plexiglas box and lowered into a noisy crowd at a New Year’s Eve celebration.

PETA has advised the WRC that the nation’s top marsupial experts agree that the so-called “Opossum Drop” is inhumane and that forcing a wild, captive opossum to dangle above a crowd of humans, a primary predator, with screaming celebrants, thumping music, musket fire, and fireworks, frightens the animal so severely that he or she is likely to die after the event from stress-induced illnesses.

General counsel to PETA Jeff Kerr, says, “PETA now continues the case in the hope of relegating this cruel event to the trash heap of history, where it belongs.”