Photos: ‘Dead Goose’ Outside Marks & Spencer Confront Shoppers Over Down Cruelty

London – Today, PETA supporters brandishing a “dead goose” and carrying signs proclaiming, “Here’s The Rest of Your Down Jacket” surprised shoppers outside Marks & Spencer’s flagship store on Oxford Street in a push for retailers and consumers to reject down. The action follows a new PETA Asia investigation revealing workers on duck farms and at slaughterhouses in Vietnam stabbing conscious ducks in the neck and cutting off the legs of live birds, who continued to shriek and struggle after being dismembered. Their feathers were later sold to companies, including Marks & Spencer, H&M, and GAP, as “responsibly sourced”.

Photos from the action are available here.

“Instead of profiting from cutting up ducks and geese, companies need to cut ties with the egregiously cruel down industry,” says PETA Vice President of UK Programmes & Operations Elisa Allen. “PETA is calling on Marks & Spencer and all other companies that still peddle feathers to ban the sale of all down, regardless of which deceptive assurance scheme it’s labelled with, and asking shoppers to allow these gentle birds to keep their feathers by leaving down pillows and jackets off their shopping lists.”

Ducks and geese in the down industry are kept in filthy, crowded sheds with wire flooring and denied the opportunity to engage in natural behaviour such as bathing, swimming, flying, and foraging. At the slaughterhouse, they endure slow, agonising deaths.

PETA – whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to wear” – opposes speciesism, a human-supremacist worldview. For more information, please visit PETA.org.uk or follow the group on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram.

Contact:

Sascha Camilli +44 207-923-6244; [email protected]

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