Video: PETA Ruffles H&M’s Feathers at Nottingham Store Grand Opening

2 May 2024

Nottingham – Today, PETA supporters holding signs reading, “H&M: Selling Down Is Bloody Cruel. Drop It” and “Birds Stabbed for Down” crashed the grand opening of H&M’s new Victoria Centre store to urge the retailer to stop selling products made from feathers. Two activists interrupted the event by shouting, “Ducks are stabbed, kicked, and shackled before their feathers are torn from their bodies for H&M products. H&M: cut the cruelty. Drop down!” This is PETA’s latest demonstration in a string of actions encouraging H&M to ditch down – and all animal-derived materials – which include a protest outside the company’s annual meeting last spring.

Footage and more images are available here.

“Every down-filled item, from jackets to cushions, is stuffed with feathers that were torn from terrified birds who died in agony,” says PETA Senior Campaigns Manager Kate Werner. “PETA is calling on H&M to cut the cruelty by banning down and urges everyone to fill their wardrobes with cosy and comfortable vegan materials.”

A PETA Asia investigation into Vina Prauden – a Vietnamese company that has previously supplied down to H&M – shows ducks suffering from gaping, bloody wounds inside dirty sheds and on lots strewn with faeces and being stabbed in the neck while still conscious. Many of the birds continued to move for more than a minute after workers slashed their necks and cut off their feet. PETA entities have released nine exposés of the down industry, each one proving that filth, suffering, and violent deaths are industry norms.

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 Facebook, X, TikTok, or Instagram.

Contact:

Lucy Watson +44 (0) 20 7837 6327; [email protected]

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