15.08.2024
Sydney – People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) activists crashed the window display at David Jones’ flagship store to protest against the department store’s sale of products made from skin stripped from wild animals like snakes, lizards, crocodiles, and ostriches. Dressed in black and holding signs that read, “David Jones Has Blood on Its Hands” and “Wild-Animal Skins Kill”, the activists climbed into the iconic store windows that face Elizabeth Street to alert the public to the fact that David Jones still hasn’t created a policy to ban wild-animal skins, despite several closed-door meetings.
Photos and video footage of the action are available here. Credit: Chrissie Hall
“We know David Jones agrees that stealing the skin of wild animals is cruel and terrible for the planet, because bosses have told us they don’t use them in the company’s 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 are profiting from the miserable lives and violent deaths of animals who are either ripped from their homes in nature or raised on filthy factory farms.”
Several exposés released by PETA have revealed the suffering wild animals endure in the skins trade. One investigation revealed a worker at Thailand’s Phokkathara Crocodile Farm and Live Show employing a crude “nape stab” method to kill a crocodile, attempting to sever the spinal cord and likely causing a slow, agonising death. The animal’s legs continued to move for at least 23 minutes after the worker violently thrust a metal blade into their neck.
Another revealed how workers in a slaughterhouse in Indonesia hit pythons on the head with a hammer and drove nails through their heads into a wooden board – all while the animals were fully conscious. Employees were seen forcing tubes into the snakes’ mouths or chopping off their tails before pumping them full of water – all without pain relief – and skinning them while they’re likely still alive. Meanwhile, PETA Asia investigators documented workers striking struggling lizards up to 14 times with a machete to decapitate the animals. It’s not only reptiles at risk from this deadly trade – a PETA US investigation into ostrich abattoirs caught workers striking birds in the head before shoving them into kill boxes and slitting their throats.
Conservation experts have warned that the next zoonotic disease to affect humans could be fuelled by the fashion industry’s demand for animal skins, the trade in which sees animals confined on filthy, crowded farms and killed at blood-soaked “wet markets” and slaughterhouses. Aside from being cruel, keeping sick, stressed animals in cramped conditions amid bodily fluids 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” – 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 Media@peta.org.au
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