PETA India Animal Times Monsoon 2020

Vegan Leather Takes Centre Stage at Lakmé FashionWeek

At Lakmé Fashion Week’s Sustainable Fashion Day, PETA India presented Kanpur FlowerCycling Pvt Ltd with the Best Innovation in Fashion Award for its biodegradable vegan leather made from discarded temple flowers – which would otherwise have ended up in the Ganges, where tannery pollution also runs rampant – called Fleather. The animal leather industry keeps skins from rotting by using caustic, toxic chemicals that not only pollute waterways but also can cause cancer as well as skin and respiratory disorders in humans who work in and live near tanneries. The event also launched PETA India’s new pro-vegan fashion campaign starring actor, activist, and entrepreneur Sunny Leone . Her ads viscerally portray the pain and agony that animal derived leather causes. Cows and other animals exploited for their skins are loaded into severely crowded trucks and sent to the slaughterhouse – sometimes dying en route – where workers slash their throats and dismember and skin them while they’re still conscious. WHAT YOU CAN DO To learn which companies have earned the “PETA-Approved Vegan” logo, please visit PETAIndia.com/PAV .

Photo: © Avinash Gowariker

PETA India ,

s Pune Dissection Demo a Hit

Just before National Science Day, a “gutted” PETA India volunteer urged Pune to denounce the dissection of animals and to report to PETA India any cases of the cruel and archaic practice in schools and universities. Many educational bodies have banned the dissection of animals, but we continue to receive complaints from distressed students forced to watch or participate in it. Every year, tens of millions of dead animals are cut open in classrooms around the world, yet studies have repeatedly shown that students learn better by

using humane, digital dissection software, such as ProDissector Frog , BioLab Frog , Digi-Frog , and Froggipedia (an Indian app that Apple named iPad App of the Year). Such superior, modern options save time and money, can be used over and over again, and help protect ecosystems by sparing animals’ lives.

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Monsoon 2020 • PETA India’s Animal Times ® 5