Dolce & Gabbana Under Fire After Video Shows Minks Suffering on Squalid Farms

For Immediate Release:
13 March 2018

Contact:
Olivia Jordan +44 (0) 20 7837 6327, ext 229; [email protected]

DOLCE & GABBANA UNDER FIRE AFTER VIDEO SHOWS MINKS SUFFERING ON SQUALID FARMS
New Video Exposé Reveals Pools of Waste Crawling With Maggots on Canadian Mink Farms

London – Armed with a new video exposé that shows minks living in misery on five Canadian farms, PETA is calling on Dolce & Gabbana – which sells mink bags, shoes, and coats, among other fur items – to join Giorgio Armani, Jimmy Choo, Gucci, Michael Kors, and many other leading designers and brands in banning fur.

The exposé, created from footage captured by an eyewitness named Malcolm Klimowicz, reveals that minks on these farms are crammed into small cages with wire flooring that digs into their feet. Cobwebs and rust cover their cages, while heaps of excrement and pools of waste infested with maggots decay below them. The severe crowding leads to fighting, injury, and even death. Several minks were missing ears, one animal’s head had an open sore, and others had to climb over the decomposing body of a dead cagemate.

“When so many designers and brands, including Giorgio Armani, Gucci, and Michael Kors, are embracing warm and stylish animal-free fabrics, it’s unconscionable for Dolce & Gabbana to keep clinging to animal fur,” says PETA Director Elisa Allen. “This latest exposé shows once again that fur coats, collars, and cuffs sentence sensitive animals to a miserable life inside tiny, filthy wire cages on fur farms.”

PETA – whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to wear” – notes that minks are solitary, semi-aquatic animals who can occupy thousands of acres of wetland habitat in nature. But on fur farms, they’re confined to severely crowded cages without adequate space to groom themselves, eliminate, nest, care for their young, and rest. The exposé shows that they frantically pace back and forth or gnaw on the rusty wires of the cages – signs of “zoochosis”, or captivity-induced insanity.

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

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