Will Kering CEO Pinault Join PETA on Exotic-Skins Slaughterhouse Tour?
29.04.2024
London – At Kering’s annual meeting last week, a representative of shareholder PETA US urged the company to ban exotic skins, citing extreme cruelty to animals in its supply chain. Kering CEO François-Henri Pinault replied that the company was “ready to collaborate with [PETA] to put an end to this type of practice, even if we continue to use exotic skins”. In response, PETA Founder Ingrid Newkirk wrote to Pinault to propose that PETA US accompany Kering representatives on a visit to the company’s exotic-animal farms and slaughterhouses, where animals are routinely abused and killed for fashion items.
“[E]ven on farms that are certified, audited, and verified by third parties, the cruel methods used to kill animals … are standard,” writes Newkirk. “In the interests of a genuine desire to move matters forward, we suggest that PETA accompany Kering representatives on a visit to the company’s exotic-animal farms and slaughterhouses.”
On two python farms in Thailand that supply skins to the Kering-owned tannery Caravel, PETA Asia investigators documented that emaciated and sick pythons were housed in such deprived conditions that a reptile expert condemned their treatment as inhumane. Workers bashed pythons in the head with hammers, impaled them on hooks, pumped their bodies full of water as they continued to move, and then skinned them. A 2021 investigation into a slaughterhouse in Indonesia that confirmed it supplied lizard skin to Kering revealed that workers decapitated and dismembered the animals using machetes. And in 2015, Gucci was implicated in a PETA US investigation into ostrich-slaughter companies, which found that workers forced birds into stun boxes and slit their throats.
PETA notes that many major designers, such as Mulberry, Victoria Beckham, Chanel, Burberry, Diane von Furstenberg, and Vivienne Westwood, have banned the use of the skin of reptiles or other wildlife. Copenhagen Fashion Week also recently banned exotic skins from its runways.
Ingrid Newkirk’s letter to Pinault is available here.
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:
Sascha Camilli +44 (0) 20 7923 6244; [email protected]
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