Nearly Naked Herne Bay PETA Activist Flies the Flag Against Cruelty to Animals in Paris Olympics Protest
22 July 2024
Nearly Naked Herne Bay PETA Activist Flies the Flag Against Cruelty to Animals in Paris Olympics Protest
Paris – Ahead of the 2024 Olympic Games, activist Reuben Skeats, 24, from Herne Bay, has joined 15ther nearly naked PETA activists – each body-painted as a different nation’s flag – to draw attention to the routine mistreatment and exploitation of animals for fur, leather, and feathers. Painted head to toe to resemble the Union Jack and holding a sign that read, “United Against Cruelty to Animals” on one side and “No Leather, Feathers, or Fur!” on the other, Skeats and other activists made a colourful display in Place de la République in the heart of Paris.
Photos of the demonstration are available here.
“The Olympic Games are about solidarity and peace, which makes Paris the perfect stage for us to stand as a united coalition of painted flags and remind everyone that there’s no place anywhere in the world for exploiting animals for their skin,” says Skeats. “All eyes are on the Olympics in the fashion capital of the world, and we’re calling on the industry to play fair and stop confining, bludgeoning, and skinning animals – sometimes while they’re still alive – for fur, leather, feathers, and other materials obtained from their suffering.”
Animals on fur farms spend their entire lives in cramped, filthy cages, where they often go insane from confinement before workers kill them with poison or gas or by breaking their neck or electrocuting them. In the leather industry, more than 1 billion animals a year are confined to hellish factory farms before being taken to the abattoir, where their throats are slit. Meanwhile, birds exploited for their down and feathers are denied everything that’s natural and important to them in the meat and foie gras industries or painfully plucked alive, severely wounding their delicate skin, over and over again before they are killed.
As Paris is in the global spotlight in the run up to the Olympic Games, PETA has held other actions for animals, such as denouncing luxury fashion house LVMH’s use of wild animals’ skins by projecting a provocative video across some of the city’s most iconic landmarks, including the Eiffel Tower and during an Olympics-themed Vogue World fashion show at Place Vendôme.
PETA – whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to wear” – opposes speciesism, a human-supremacist worldview. For more information, please visit PETA.org.uk or follow the group on Facebook, X, TikTok, or Instagram.
Contact:
Lucy Watson +44 (0) 20 7837 6327; [email protected]
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