“Rats’ in Chinatown to Protest Animal Tests This Lunar New Year

PETA Will Celebrate the Year of the Rat by Urging People to Shop Cruelty-Free

For Immediate Release:
January 22, 2020

Contact:
Tasgola Bruner 202-483-7382

To ring in the Year of the Rat, a group of PETA “rats” will scurry to a busy intersection in Chinatown on Thursday with a message for passersby: Buy only cruelty-free cosmetics products that weren’t tested on rats or any other animal.

When:    Thursday, January 23, 12 noon

Where:    601 N. Broadway (at the intersection with W. Cesar Estrada Chavez Avenue), Los Angeles

“Rats are highly intelligent, social animals who deserve better than to be used in painful and deadly tests just to market a new mascara,” says PETA International Student Outreach Coordinator James Hou. “PETA is calling on kind consumers to celebrate the Year of the Rat by opting for personal-care products that aren’t the product of animal suffering.”

This month marks the implementation of California’s landmark Cruelty-Free Cosmetics Act, which prohibits the sale of animal-tested cosmetics products and ingredients—but it doesn’t bar companies that pay for animal tests in China from selling in the state. China requires tests in which substances are force-fed to animals and dripped into their eyes for all imported cosmetics.

PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to experiment on”—maintains a comprehensive database of more than 4,000 vegan, cruelty-free companies and brands that don’t test on animals anywhere in the world.

PETA opposes speciesism, a human-supremacist worldview. For more information, please visit PETA.org or click here.