Row Over Cruelty to Coyotes and Geese Moves to Canada Goose Boardroom

PETA Purchases Stock in Retailer to Push for an End to Sales of Real Fur and Down

For Immediate Release:
March 16, 2017

Contact:
Sophia Charchuk 202-483-7382

As outerwear company Canada Goose goes public, it’s meeting an unexpected buyer: PETA. In order to ask for policy changes, the animal-protection group purchased the minimum number of shares required to submit shareholder resolutions and to attend and speak at the company’s annual meetings. PETA’s first order of business as part owner of Canada Goose? To pressure the company to stop using fur from cruelly trapped coyotes and down feathers from slaughtered geese.

“Cruelty is part of every Canada Goose jacket trimmed with real fur and filled with real down,” says PETA President Ingrid Newkirk. “From holding demonstrations to taking resolutions to the boardroom to having people rip the fur from their collars and give their jackets to the homeless, PETA is pushing the company to stop peddling parkas that cause immense pain and suffering to coyotes and geese.”

PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to wear”—points out that trapped animals like coyotes, especially mothers desperate to get back to their starving babies, have been known to attempt to chew off their own limbs to escape. If trapped animals don’t die from blood loss, infection, or frostbite, they’re often bludgeoned, stomped on, or shot to death when the trapper returns—as this video that went viral shows. In addition, birds abused for down spend their entire lives in crowded, filthy sheds until they’re killed. Some geese’s throats are slit while they’re still conscious and able to feel pain.

PETA has held several protests outside Canada Goose’s headquarters and retail stores, including one led by Designated Survivor star Maggie Q at the company’s Toronto headquarters in January. The actor also donated a Canada Goose coat that she had received as a gift to Wully Outerwear, as part of its Trade-Up Program, which allows shoppers to exchange their fur-trimmed coats for a stylish, cruelty-free winter jacket.

For more information, please visit PETA.org.