PETA Global AU 2024 Issue 3

TELL IT LIKE IT IS, TRACY PETA Executive Vice President Tracy Reiman tackles your tough questions and tricky situations. ! Unless your travel companion’s name is Samsonite, they definitely don’t belong in cargo holds. These areas are not always climate-controlled, and many animals have frozen to death or died of heatstroke in them. Others have been suffocated, injured, or lost. And the noise and turbulence are much more terrifying when you’re in “forgotten class” without so much as a pretzel. If your animals are allowed in the cabin with you, a short flight should be fine. If the flight is long or your dogs are too big, please don’t even think about doing this. Drive or leave them in the care of someone you absolutely trust. Every summer when we go to the beach, my kids get me to buy a hermit crab for them. I don’t really see anything wrong with doing that, but I’m betting you do! Are you running out of space in your yard … for hermit crab burial plots? As you likely know, most hermit crabs who’ve been taken from their coastal homes and close-knit colonies to be sold die within a few months – far short of their 30-year life expectancy. You probably won’t want to snuggle up with your kids and put on the video of PETA’s investigation into a hermit crab supplier showing that bags full of living and dead crabs and detached claws were dumped into filthy pens, that live crabs were thrown into the trash with dead ones, and that workers cracked open the animals’ shells, exposing their delicate bodies, and forced Q A Q A We are traveling this summer and want to fly with our dogs. What does PETA recommend?

– Again! Seize the Stage PETA Entities at Fashion Weeks

Background: © iStock.com/Maxiphoto

Hermit crab: © iStock.com/indriani indriani

L ast fall, headlines from fashion weeks around the world were dominated by PETA entities’ runway disruptions and powerful demonstrations. Even Vogue acknowledged their impact, and GQ reported, “Just about everybody … has been wondering which brand is next – and how exactly PETA has been pulling it off.” While we can’t reveal that secret, we’re happy to reveal almost everything else that has us keeping animals’ cause front and center again this year.

While Victoria Beckham ’s brand committed to not

using fur early on and banned exotic skins following efforts by PETA UK, its collections still include leather. Cows’ throats are slit and, as reports from inside slaughterhouses show, they’re often skinned while still alive for the material. At the label’s Paris show, PETA France and PETA UK crashed the runway three times , with each consecutive sign wielding supporter eliciting louder gasps from the audience, which included Vogue ’s Anna Wintour . PETA UK has informed Beckham about the cruelty of leather multiple times, including via a video in which “blood”-drenched accessories spill from a cow-shaped piñata. In Milan, Italian singer and TV personality Daniela Martani – wearing faux snakeskin and dripping with fake blood – slithered up to the Prada store entrance and called out the brand for selling reptile-skin items. The company went fur-free in 2019 after more than a decade of pressure; now it needs to drop all stolen skins. Martani also sent a personal appeal to Miuccia Prada via video on behalf of PETA US.

On LVMH CEO Bernard Arnault’s birthday, PETA France sent a cake to the Louis Vuitton Paris Fashion Week show. Out of it popped French actor Céline Durand bodypainted as a bloodied snake, demanding that LVMH stop selling skins stolen from snakes, ostriches, crocodiles, lizards, and other wild animals. PETA entities have documented pervasive cruelty at slaughterhouses that supply “exotic” skins, including workers bashing live snakes with hammers and shoving metal rods down live crocodiles’ spines. PETA France supporters crashed the company’s annual meeting in Paris, shouting, “Stop killing wildlife!” and “Shame on LVMH!“

PETA entities also stormed the runways at fashion weeks in Berlin, London, and Milan, with more to come.

them into shells coated with paint – which can be toxic.

But surely you can tell them this: It should be obvious, but a plastic box with nothing more than aquarium pebbles and a fake palm tree doesn’t come close to meeting these sensitive individuals’ needs or replicating the life they were forced to leave behind for fleeting human amusement. That type of habitat is only suitable for a pet rock. If hermit crabs don’t have deep, damp sand to molt in, they’ll die. If their modified gills don’t have high humidity levels in order to breathe, they’ll suffocate. Hermit crabs don’t care if they look like doughnuts or team helmets, and those whose shells are made to look that way are often poisoned by the paint. Stay the shell away from tourist traps that exploit these animals.

Céline Durand: © Maximilien Sporschill

Daniela Martani: © Rossella Papetti

Be Part of It! There are lots of actions you can take to help end the killing of animals for their skin. See some suggestions at

Be Part of It! Do you have a burning question for Tracy? E-mail it to PETAGlobal@peta.org.au .

PETA.org.au/LouisVuitton and PETA.org.au/Ostriches .

Global 21

20 SAVE SOMEONE THIS WINTER