‘Bleeding’ Brighton Local Protests Cruelty To Reptiles For Hermès Bags

21 September 2015

PETA Exposé Reveals Live Reptiles Sawn Open on Supplier’s Farm

Brighton – PETA supporter and Brighton resident Daryna Milgevska, 22, lay in a pool of “blood” wearing only crocodile-printed leggings outside the Hermès shop in central Moscow today. The action came in the wake of PETA’s exposé of farms that supply crocodile and alligator skins to Hermès-owned tanneries, which revealed that reptiles were trapped in barren and severely crowded pits. One farm manager sawed open alligators’ necks, and some of the animals were still moving minutes after the crude attempt to slaughter them.

“I was shocked by PETA’s exposé which reveals Hermès’ ‘luxury’ accessories are sourced from living, feeling animals who were mutilated and left to die slowly and in pain on squalid farms”, says Daryna. “I travelled to Russia to join PETA in calling on Hermès to stop profiting from these animals’ miserable lives and deaths by taking exotic skins off the shelves for good.”

Photos from the protest can be found here, here and here.

More images are available upon request.

As documented in the investigation by PETA US – whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to wear” – workers shot alligators in the head, some multiple times, with a captive-bolt gun and sawed into the back of their necks with a box cutter to sever their blood vessels. Some animals survived and were seen moving in ice-water bins minutes afterwards. When the captive-bolt gun was believed to be malfunctioning, a facility manager told a worker to cut into hundreds of conscious alligators and try to dislocate their vertebrae and then shove a metal rod up their spinal columns in an attempt to scramble their brains.

For more information, please visit PETA.org.uk.