Meet Louis Vuitton’s Newest Shareholder: PETA!

In the wake of a PETA exposé revealing that reptiles on crocodile farms in Vietnam—including two that have supplied skins to a tannery owned by Louis Vuitton‘s parent company, LVMH—are confined to tiny pits and sometimes hacked into while they’re still alive and thrashing, PETA has become a shareholder of LVMH on the Euronext Paris to put pressure on the company to stop selling exotic skins merchandise.

“Every PETA exposé of the exotic-skins industry has found sensitive living beings crammed into filthy pits, hacked apart, and left to die,” says PETA President Ingrid Newkirk. “From demonstrating on the street to speaking up in the boardroom, PETA will push LVMH to stop selling any bag, watchband, or shoe made from a reptile’s skin.”

PETA’s exposé, which has been viewed more than 30 million times, reveals that at the two farms which have supplied LVMH, reptiles lay motionless in thousands of tiny concrete cells, some shorter than their own bodies, for 15 months before finally being slaughtered. Others were jam-packed by the dozens into barren concrete pits. At another 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.

PETA has exposed cruelty on reptile farms on three continents (Africa, North America, and Asia) and each time has shown that these intelligent, sensitive animals endure squalid imprisonment and a violent death.