The Kooples Targeted In New Call To End Angora And Fur Sales

PETA Urges Fashion Retailer to Drop Angora in Light of Shocking New Report on Chinese Farms

London – Today PETA has launched a campaign encouraging its members and supporters to call on fashion retailer The Kooples to end its sale of angora and fur immediately. The French company has ignored appeals from PETA to do the right thing and has yet to join more than 110 top brands – including AllSaints, Calvin Klein, H&M, Zara and, most recently, Benetton – in permanently dropping angora wool from its collections.

"Shoppers now know that rabbits suffer immensely – and even scream in pain – as the fur is violently ripped from their sensitive skin for angora products", says PETA Senior Manager of Corporate Projects Yvonne Taylor. "And with opinion polls showing that 95 per cent of people would never wear real fur, The Kooples stands alone on the British high street in its endorsement of those two horrifically cruel industries."

A new report details how staff and a veterinarian from PETA US – whose motto reads, in part, that "animals are not ours to wear" – conducted unannounced inspections of five farms in China's Shandong and Zhejiang provinces that had been deemed "humane" after being audited only weeks before and discovered abuse even worse than previously documented. The group found that rabbits not only had their fur ripped from their skin, leaving them in distress and their bodies bare, but they also suffered from painful medical conditions, including eye infections, inner-ear infections, debilitating neurological diseases, heat stress and respiratory diseases. The veterinarian found that rabbits were being denied basic veterinary care and relief from heat in excess of 38 degrees.

A recent PETA exposé of the "Origin Assured" label – a marketing scheme set up by the fur industry itself – graphically shows how animals on fur farms in Europe and North America spend their lives confined to cramped, filthy wire cages before being electrocuted, gassed or poisoned. In the wild, animals caught in steel leg-hold traps can suffer for days from blood loss, dehydration and attack by predators before being suffocated or bludgeoned to death.

PETA US' report is available upon request. For more information, please click here or visit PETA.org.uk.