PETA Activist Detained by Police for Protesting Cruelty to Reptiles for Hermès Bags

For Immediate Release:

14th September 2015

Contact:

Harriet Barclay +44 (0) 20 7837 6327, ext 264; [email protected]

PETA ACTIVIST DETAINED BY POLICE FOR PROTESTING CRUELTY TO REPTILES FOR HERMÈS BAGS

‘Bleeding’ Model Protesting After PETA Exposé Reveals Live Reptiles Sawn Open on Supplier’s Farm

Luxembourg – A PETA supporter has been detained by police after wearing only crocodile print leggings and lying in a pool of “blood” outside the Hermès Luxembourg store today. The action came in the wake of PETA’s exposé of farms that supply crocodile and alligator skins to Hermès-owned tanneries, which revealed that reptiles were trapped in barren and severely crowded pits. One farm manager sawed open alligators’ necks, and some of the animals were still moving minutes after the crude attempt to slaughter them.

“PETA’s exposé reveals the grisly source of Hermès’ ‘luxury’ accessories – living, feeling animals who were mutilated and left to die slowly and in pain on squalid farms”, says PETA Director Mimi Bekhechi. “We are calling on Hermès to stop profiting from these animals’ miserable lives and deaths by taking exotic skins off the shelves for good.”

Photos from the protest can be found here, here and here.

As documented in the investigation by PETA US – whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to wear” – workers shot alligators in the head, some multiple times, with a captive-bolt gun and sawed into the back of their necks with a box cutter to sever their blood vessels. Some animals survived and were seen moving in ice-water bins minutes afterwards. When the captive-bolt gun was believed to be malfunctioning, a facility manager told a worker to cut into hundreds of conscious alligators and try to dislocate their vertebrae and then shove a metal rod up their spinal columns in an attempt to scramble their brains.

For more information, please visit PETA.org.uk.

#