Little Mix’s Big Message: ‘Get Wild Animals Out of the Circus!’

Girl Group Joins peta2 to Call for an End to Caging, Chaining Animals and Beating Them Into Performing

For Immediate Release:
August 18, 2015

Contact:
Moira Colley 202-483-7382

Hot off the release of their newest single, “Black Magic,” the members of hit British girl group Little Mix are starring in a new campaign for peta2—PETA’s youth division. In the ad, available here, the girls wear heavy chains and sit on a circus-style pedestal next to the words “Shackled, Beaten, and Depressed. Get Wild Animals Out of the Circus!”

“True entertainment is watching fantastic human performers like Little Mix—not elephants, lions, and tigers who’ve been beaten day after day in the circus,” says peta2 Director Marta Holmberg. “peta2 and Little Mix are calling on kind people everywhere to steer clear of any circus that uses and abuses wild animals.”

During circus training, baby elephants are stretched out, slammed to the ground, gouged with bullhooks (weapons that resemble a fireplace poker with a sharp steel hook on one end), and shocked with electric prods. When tigers and elephants aren’t on stage, they’re kept caged or chained—sometimes for days or weeks at a time.

Uproar over cruelty to elephants recently prompted Ringling Bros. to pledge to phase out all its elephant acts by 2018—and PETA (whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to use for entertainment”) is calling on the circus to retire the elephants now, not after another three years of suffering on the road.

Little Mix joins a long list of musicians and other celebrities—including Fifth Harmony, P!nk, Noah Cyrus, Sia, Ke$ha, and many others—who’ve teamed up with peta2 to promote kindness to animals. The ad was shot by photographer Trevor Leighton.

For more information, please visit peta2.com.