Video: Veterinarian Haunted by Sight of Dying Angora Rabbits in China

For Immediate Release:
October 30, 2018

Contact:
David Perle 202-483-7382

Dr. Heather Rally has dedicated her life to helping animals and is now the supervising veterinarian of Captive Animal Law Enforcement for the PETA Foundation. In this new PETA video, she describes how she was forced to walk away from thousands of suffering animals who desperately needed her help—and recounts how that experience still haunts her.

In the video, Rally describes how she found herself in China on behalf of a major international retailer who wanted to see if the farms it bought angora rabbit fur from, which were billed as “ethical,” were indeed treating the animals humanely. What she witnessed horrified her and the international company, which immediately halted its angora sales and gave away its inventory to refugees. On these farms, “Dr. Heather” (as she’s affectionately known) saw sick, dying rabbits held in row upon row of barren cages in dank and dirty warehouses and rabbits in pain who’d just been plucked raw

She begged the fur farmers to let her euthanize the animals who were suffering the most, but they refused. “The answer was always no,” she says. “Walking away and leaving those rabbits was one of the hardest things I have ever had to do, so I made it my mission to stop that industry in its tracks, and we’ve done just that all over the world now.”

Her video is included in a new 10-part documentary series titled “PETA Reveals: Everybody’s Got a Story,” which highlights 10 individuals’ “Clark Kent moments”—times when a life-changing experience or personal revelation awakened their sense of social justice and triggered their evolution into activists. Rally’s moment came when she realized that although she wasn’t able to give veterinary care to those rabbits, she was able to persuade the retailer to ban angora—and now, she’s inspired to encourage everyone to do what they can to help animals, because even the smallest action can make a difference.

Other videos in the series include one woman’s realization that she couldn’t be a cheese-eating feminist and one man’s experience with post-traumatic stress after documenting abuse in the wool industry. The full series from PETA—whose motto is “Animals are not ours to experiment on, eat, wear, use for entertainment, or abuse in any other way”—is available here.

For more information, please visit PETA.org.