Tash Peterson Joins PETA to Protest David Jones’ Sales of Wild-Animal Skins
09.09.2024
Perth – Controversial animal rights activist Tash Peterson joined People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) outside the David Jones department store in Hay Street Mall to protest its sales of products made from skin stripped from wild animals such as snakes, lizards, crocodiles, and ostriches. Wearing a “bloodied” snake-print bikini to resemble an abused reptile, Peterson laid on a “blood-soaked” chopping block that reads “David Jones: Drop Wild-Animal Skins”. The action will alert the public to the fact that David Jones still hasn’t committed to adopting a policy to ban wild-animal skins despite several closed-door meetings.
Photos and video footage of the event are available here. Credit: Jack Higgs
“PETA knows David Jones agrees that stealing the skin of wild animals is cruel to animals and terrible for the planet, because company bosses have said that they don’t use them in its own private-label items,” says PETA Campaigns Advisor Mimi Bekhechi. “But by allowing third parties like Gucci and Louis Vuitton to sell wild-animal skins in David Jones stores, they’re profiting from the miserable lives and violent deaths of animals who are ripped from their homes in nature or raised on filthy factory farms.”
Several exposés released by PETA entities have revealed the suffering that wild animals endure in the skins trade. One investigation documented that a worker in Thailand employed the crude “nape stab” method to kill a crocodile, attempting to sever the spinal cord and likely causing a slow, agonising death. Another exposé revealed that workers in a slaughterhouse in Indonesia hit pythons over the head with a hammer and drove nails through their heads into a wooden board – all while the animals were fully conscious. In addition, PETA Asia investigators documented that workers struck struggling lizards up to 14 times with a machete to decapitate the animals.
Conservation experts have warned that the next zoonotic disease to affect humans could be fuelled by the fashion industry’s demand for wild-animal skins. Keeping sick, stressed animals in cramped conditions amid bodily fluids is not only cruel but also amplifies the risk of outbreaks of animal-borne illnesses that can spread to humans.
PETA – whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to wear” and which opposes speciesism, a human-supremacist worldview – urges concerned shoppers to sign its action alert demanding that David Jones bolster its policy on wild-animal skins. For more information, please visit PETA.org.au and follow the group on Facebook and Instagram.
Contact:
Sascha Camilli [email protected]
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