Video: Live Crocodiles Cut Open, Packed Into Concrete Pits for ‘Luxury’ Bags

PETA Exposes Miserable Lives and Agonizing Deaths of Crocodiles at Vietnamese Suppliers

For Immediate Release:
December 22, 2016

Contact:
Moira Colley 202-483-7382

A new PETA video exposé of crocodile farms in Vietnam—including two farms that say they supply skins to a tannery owned by Louis Vuitton‘s parent company, LVMH, which has not denied the specific allegations—reveals that 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.

In response, PETA is calling on Vietnamese law enforcement to investigate the farms for apparent violations of the country’s Law on Animal Health and is urging LVMH to stop manufacturing and selling exotic-skin products.

“Whether it’s Louis Vuitton, Hermès, Prada, or any other brand, a crocodile-skin bag means a living, feeling being experienced a miserable life and a ghastly death,” says PETA President Ingrid Newkirk. “PETA is calling on everyone not to buy exotic skins in order to prevent reptiles from being imprisoned, mutilated, and skinned alive.”

A reptile expert described the tiny concrete pits in which crocodiles are kept for more than a year before being killed as “overly-restrictive, understimulating, and inhumane” for larger crocodiles. After watching the slaughter footage from a different farm, the expert noted that “the neck incisions would have been very painful and inhumane” and that “[t]here is no probability that these animals ‘died instantly.’”

PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to wear”—has exposed cruelty on reptile farms on three continents (Africa, North America, and now Asia) and each time has shown that these intelligent, sensitive animals endure squalid imprisonment and a violent death.

Broadcast-quality footage is available for download here, photographs are available here, and PETA’s complaint to Vietnamese law-enforcement authorities is available upon request. For more information, please visit PETA.org.