Paris – Ahead of the 2024 Olympic Games, 16 nearly naked PETA activists, each body-painted as a different nation’s flag, have come together in the Olympic spirit of unity, peace, respect, and friendship to draw attention to the routine mistreatment and exploitation of animals for fur, leather, and feathers – abuse there is no place for anywhere in the world. Holding signs that read, “United Against Cruelty to Animals” and “No Leather, Feathers or Fur!” in each country’s language, the protesters made a colourful display in Place de la République in the heart of Paris.
The striking demonstration leveraged the world’s attention on Paris ahead of the Olympic Games, reminding everyone that industries that raise and kill sentient beings for their skin should be a thing of the past.
Photos of the demonstration are available here (Credit: Clothilde Tierce).
“The Olympic Games are about solidarity and peace, which makes them the perfect stage to remind the world that exploiting animals for their skin is an unjust and bloody business,” says PETA Campaigns Advisor Mimi Bekhechi. “All eyes are on Paris, the fashion capital of the world, and we’re calling on the industry to play fair and stop confining, bludgeoning, and skinning animals – sometimes while they’re still alive – for fur, leather, feathers, and other materials obtained from their suffering.”
Animals on fur farms spend their entire lives in cramped, filthy cages, where they often go insane from confinement before workers kill them with poison or gas or by breaking their neck or electrocuting them. In the leather industry, more than 1 billion animals a year are confined to hellish factory farms before being taken to the abattoir, where their throats are slit. Meanwhile, birds exploited for their down and feathers are denied everything that’s natural and important to them in the meat and foie gras industries or painfully plucked alive, severely wounding their delicate skin, over and over again before they are killed.
As Paris is in the global spotlight in the run-up to the Olympic Games, PETA has held other actions for animals, such as denouncing luxury fashion house LVMH’s use of wild animals’ skin by projecting a provocative video across some of the city’s most iconic landmarks, including the Eiffel Tower and during an Olympics-themed Vogue World fashion show at Place Vendôme.
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.au and follow the group on Facebook and Instagram.
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