Canada Goose Threatens Lawsuit to Compel PETA to Withdraw Shareholder Proposal

PETA Says, ‘We’ll Spend Our Donors’ Money Exposing and Ultimately Stopping Animal Abuse, Not on Defending an Unwarranted Lawsuit’

For Immediate Release:
June 26, 2020

Contact:
Moira Colley 202-483-7382

Two months after PETA submitted a shareholder proposal calling for a discussion at the next Annual General Meeting of Canada Goose regarding the need to stop using coyote fur from animals caught in steel traps and down from farmed birds in its parkas, the company’s lawyers sent letters threatening to sue PETA for defamation if it did not withdraw the proposal—the second consecutive year that Canada Goose has made such a threat. PETA responded, providing support for each assertion in its proposal as well as a slightly amended shareholder proposal that removed the language that had been objected to, in the hope of tabling the proposal and having the discussion, but Canada Goose has refused to distribute even the revised proposal and has reasserted its threat to sue. Facing costly litigation expenses, PETA will today announce that it’ll withdraw its proposal.

“No threats can change the fact that animals whose fur and feathers are used in Canada Goose coats are cruelly killed,” says PETA President Ingrid Newkirk. “We’ll spend our donors’ money wisely on exposing and stopping animal abuse, not on defending an unwarranted lawsuit.”

Standard industry practice in the fur and down industries allows for fur trappers to use painful snares and steel traps that slam down on coyotes’ legs and for ducks and geese to be shipped in all weather extremes to slaughterhouses, where they’re stunned, their throats are cut, and their bodies are dunked into scalding-hot defeathering tanks.

Following a PETA complaint and a subsequent Federal Trade Commission investigation, Canada Goose stopped claiming that its standards ensure that its suppliers don’t abuse animals.

A wide variety of top brands—including Hemp Tailor, Save the Duck, NOIZE, and Wuxly Movement—sell warm, stylish all-vegan coats.

PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to wear”—opposes speciesism, a human-supremacist worldview. For more information, please visit PETA.org.