PETA ‘Sheep’ to Protest Urban Outfitters in Milwaukee
Group Posts Ads Slamming Company for Selling Wool, Alpaca, Cashmere, Leather, and Other Animal-Derived Materials
For Immediate Release:
January 8, 2021
Contact:
Moira Colley 202-473-7382
On Saturday, PETA supporters in sheep masks will lead a spirited, socially distanced protest outside the Urban Outfitters store at E. Kenilworth Place. Protesters will block the store’s entrance and screen new, gruesome video footage from PETA Asia’s latest investigation into the wool industry in Australia—which produces 88% of the world’s supply used for apparel, including wool sold by Urban Outfitters brands—showing shearers punching sheep and leaving them bleeding from deep wounds.
When: Saturday, January 9, 1 p.m.
Where: Urban Outfitters, 1937 E. Kenilworth Pl. (at the intersection with N. Prospect Avenue), Milwaukee
The protest is part of PETA’s new international campaign demanding that all Urban Outfitters, Inc., brands—which include Anthropologie and Free People—stop selling wool and anything else cruelly obtained from animals. It coincides with PETA’s takeover of two city bike stations—including one right in front of the protest site—with ads showing stills of abused animals in the wool, alpaca, and cashmere industries.
“Urban Outfitters brands want to appeal to open-minded and progressive young people, but they’re missing the mark by selling fleece taken from animals who get beat up, cut up, and killed in the process,” says PETA Executive Vice President Tracy Reiman. “Anything forcibly taken from an animal is a product of fear and suffering, and PETA is holding Urban Outfitters to its consumer pledge of sustainability and ethics by calling on the company to sell only vegan materials, which would be easy for it to do because it already stocks them.”
PETA notes that workers hit, kick, and mutilate gentle sheep for their wool; pin down goats and pull their hair out with sharp metal combs, leaving them with bloody wounds at cashmere operations; and make alpacas spit and vomit in fear as they’re shorn.
PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to wear” and which opposes speciesism, a human-supremacist worldview—has also protested at other Urban Outfitters brands stores across the country. For more information, please visit PETA.org or follow the group on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram.
PETA’s ads are on bike stations located at 2165 N. Prospect Ave., right outside an Urban Outfitters store, and at 411 N. Broadway, about a block away from an Anthropologie store.
