Video: Live Crocodiles Cut Open, Packed into Concrete Pits for ‘Luxury’ Designer Bags

For Immediate Release:
22 December 2016

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

VIDEO: LIVE CROCODILES CUT OPEN, PACKED INTO CONCRETE PITS FOR ‘LUXURY’ DESIGNER BAGS

PETA Exposes Miserable Lives of Crocodiles at Vietnamese Suppliers to LVMH and Other Brands

London – A new PETA video exposé of crocodile farms in Vietnam – including two farms that say they supply skins to a tannery owned by Louis Vuitton parent company, LVMH, which has not denied the specific allegations – reveals that reptiles lay motionless in thousands of tiny concrete cells, some shorter than their own bodies. Others were jam-packed by the dozens into barren concrete pits. At a third farm, workers hacked into thrashing crocodiles’ necks and rammed metal rods down their spines as blood poured from the wounds, and one crocodile is shown still moving after being skinned. This killing method has long been shown to be inhumane, and experts have found that crocodilians remain conscious for over an hour after their spinal cord has been severed and their blood vessels cut.

In response, PETA is urging LVMH to stop manufacturing and selling exotic-skin products.

“Whether it’s Louis Vuitton, Hermès, Prada, or any other brand, a crocodile-skin bag means a living, feeling being experienced a miserable life and a ghastly death”, says PETA Managing Director Ingrid Newkirk. “PETA is calling on everyone not to buy exotic skins in order to prevent reptiles from being imprisoned, mutilated, and sometimes skinned alive.”

A reptile expert described the tiny concrete pits in which crocodiles are kept for more than a year before being killed as “overly-restrictive, under stimulating, and inhumane” for larger crocodiles. After watching the slaughter footage from a different farm, the expert noted that “the neck incisions would have been very painful and inhumane”, and “There is no probability that these animals ‘died instantly'”.

PETA – whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to wear” – has exposed cruelty on reptile farms on three continents (Africa, North America, and now Asia) and each time has shown that these intelligent, sensitive animals endure squalid imprisonment and a violent death.

Photographs are available here, and PETA US’ complaint to Vietnamese law-enforcement authorities calling on them to investigate the farms for apparent violations of the country’s Law on Animal Health is available upon request. For more information, please visit PETA.org.uk

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