PETA Will ‘Close’ Urban Outfitters for Cruelty After Wool-Industry Exposé
Protesters to Demand End to Sale of Wool and Other Animal-Derived Materials
For Immediate Release:
December 17, 2020
Contact:
Nicole Meyer 202-483-7382
Tomorrow, a PETA supporter in a sheep costume will lead protesters as they surround an Urban Outfitters store in Lawrence, Kansas, and block its entrance as part of a new international campaign demanding that all Urban Outfitters, Inc., brands—which include Anthropologie, Free People, and Urban Outfitters—stop selling wool and anything else cruelly obtained from animals.
When: Friday, December 18, 2 p.m.
Where: Urban Outfitters, 1033 Massachusetts St., Lawrence
The protesters will screen brand-new video footage from PETA’s latest investigation of the wool industry in Australia—which produces 88% of the world’s supply for apparel, including wool sold by Urban Outfitters, Inc., brands—showing shearers punching sheep, cutting off swaths of their skin, and leaving them bleeding from deep wounds. This is the 14th exposé of the global wool industry from PETA and its international affiliates, which have now found cruelty to sheep on 117 properties in six countries on four continents.
“Urban Outfitters brands want to appeal to 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 PETA is holding Urban Outfitters to its consumer pledge of being sustainable and ethical by calling on the company to sell only vegan materials—which would be easy for it to do, because it already stocks them.”
PETA launched its campaign after Anthropologie was implicated in a first-of-its-kind PETA investigation into the alpaca industry revealing that workers on a farm in Peru tied crying alpacas to a rack, pulling their legs so hard that they nearly came out of their sockets, and left them with bloody wounds from rough shearing. The mutilated animals spat and vomited in fear.
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 or follow the group on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram.
