Good News for Rabbits: American Vintage Bans Angora
Good News for Rabbits: American Vintage Bans Angora
After a Long-Standing PETA Campaign, the French Brand Is Ending Its Use of the Cruelly Obtained Material
London – After nearly two years of pressure from PETA and its international affiliates, French fashion label American Vintage – which has more than 1,500 outlets in 10 countries – has committed to a ban on the use of angora in all future collections.
“For every angora garment, rabbits are tormented when their fur is painfully torn from their bodies before they end up at the slaughterhouse,” says PETA Director of Corporate Projects Yvonne Taylor. “We are delighted that American Vintage has made this compassionate decision and urge all other retailers to follow suit.”
PETA has exposed angora farms in China which claim to offer animal welfare guarantees to companies like American Vintage. The investigators found that rabbits spend their lives in filthy cages, with no enrichment or veterinary care. They are only let out to be subjected to violent plucking, during which they scream in terror and agony as they are tied up and held down on a work surface and their soft hair is torn out by the fistful, sometimes tearing their delicate skin. Finally, after a short, miserable life, the animals are violently killed at the slaughterhouse.
PETA – whose motto reads, in part, that “Animals are not ours to wear” – has organised dozens of protests in front of the brand’s shops, including an international day of action in 2020 with demonstrations in Dijon, Lyon, Nice, Paris, and Strasbourg, France; London; Milan and Rome, Italy; and Frankfurt and Hamburg, Germany. On the day, the company was also bombarded with messages from more than 320,000 supporters of the group and its international affiliates and received thousands of indignant comments on social media.
American Vintage joins a long list of more than 400 brands and retailers, including H&M, Mango, Gucci, The Kooples, Calvin Klein, and Lacoste, which have committed to not selling angora after being informed of PETA’s exposés.
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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