'BLEEDING' MODEL PROTESTS CRUELTY TO REPTILES FOR HERMÈS BAGS

PETA Exposé Reveals Live Reptiles Sawn Open on Supplier's Farm

London - A PETA supporter lay body-painted like a crocodile in a pool of "blood" outside the Hermès shop at The Royal Exchange today. The action came in the wake of PETA's exposé of farms that supply crocodile and alligator skins to Hermès-owned tanneries, which revealed that reptiles were trapped in barren and severely crowded pits. One farm manager sawed open alligators' necks, and some of the animals were still moving minutes after the crude attempt to slaughter them.

"PETA's exposé reveals the grisly source of Hermès' 'luxury' accessories – living, feeling animals who were mutilated and left to die slowly and in pain on squalid farms", says PETA Director Mimi Bekhechi. "We are calling on Hermès to stop profiting from these animals' miserable lives and deaths by taking exotic skins off the shelves for good."

Photos from the protest can be found here, here and here.

More images are available upon request.

As documented in the investigation by PETA US – whose motto reads, in part, that "animals are not ours to wear" – workers shot alligators in the head, some multiple times, with a captive-bolt gun and sawed into the back of their necks with a box cutter to sever their blood vessels. Some animals survived and were seen moving in ice-water bins minutes afterwards. When the captive-bolt gun was believed to be malfunctioning, a facility manager told a worker to cut into hundreds of conscious alligators and try to dislocate their vertebrae and then shove a metal rod up their spinal columns in an attempt to scramble their brains.

For more information, please visit PETA.org.uk.

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