Ahead of The Fashion Awards, Nearly 77,000 PETA Supporters Urge British Fashion Council to Adopt Fur-Free Policy
Ahead of The Fashion Awards, Nearly 77,000 PETA Supporters Urge British Fashion Council to Adopt Fur-Free Policy
London – As tonight’s Fashion Awards 2020 have been forced to move online because of the COVID-19 pandemic – and the fur industry is directly implicated in the spread of the novel coronavirus around the world – nearly 77,000 PETA supporters have urged the British Fashion Council (BFC) to adopt a no-fur policy at all events. London Fashion Week’s influential catwalks have been fur-free since 2018, thanks to compassionate designers who refuse to work with fur, but the BFC has yet to make it one of the growing number of international fashion weeks that have adopted official fur bans.
“Cruel, filthy fur farms have been banned in the UK for 20 years and pose a serious global health risk, yet the British Fashion Council still hasn’t committed to keeping fur off its catwalks,” says PETA Director of Corporate Projects Yvonne Taylor. “Tens of thousands of kind PETA supporters want to see London Fashion Week join Amsterdam, Oslo, Helsinki, and others in committing to fur-free catwalks.”
PETA has released numerous video exposés of the global fur industry, revealing that animals on fur farms spend their entire lives confined to cramped, filthy wire cages. Fur farmers use the cheapest killing methods available, including neck-breaking, suffocation, poisoning, and genital electrocution. Animals are sometimes still alive and struggling when workers hang them up by their legs or tails to skin them.
Fur farms packed with sick, stressed, and injured animals confined next to each other have become COVID-19 hotspots. Cases of the virus have now been found in animals on fur farms in 10 countries: Denmark, France, Greece, Italy, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Poland, Spain, Sweden, and the US. A mutated strain of the novel coronavirus that originated in minks has now been discovered in humans in six countries, meaning that the cruel fur industry could pose a risk to the effectiveness of a future vaccine.
PETA – whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to wear” – opposes speciesism, which is a human-supremacist worldview. For more information, please visit PETA.org.uk or follow the group on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram.
Contact:
Sascha Camilli +44 (0) 20 7923 6244; [email protected]
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