Following an 11-week boycott campaign in the United States that involved coast-to-coast protests, petitions, letters, dead flower deliveries, and phone calls, clothing retailer J.Crew has announced that it will end all fur sales. J.Crew received much of its fur from China.
PETA launched the boycott with a protest at J.Crew's Madison Avenue store in New York on September 12 after the company began to sell fur despite its earlier assurances to PETA that it would not.
The victory for PETA means that J.Crew joins Forever 21, Gap Inc., Banana Republic, H&M, and others that have stopped selling fur in the United States.
PETA and J.Crew entered into negotiations last week after PETA's Youth Division, peta2, mobilized thousands of Street Team members to write to the company.
"By deciding to stop selling fur, J.Crew has shed its image as an uncaring company," says PETA President Ingrid E. Newkirk. "In fact, most young people are so opposed to fur that J.Crew realized that what's good for animals is also good for the bottom line."
PETA says an undercover investigation found that millions of dogs and cats in China are bludgeoned, hanged, bled to death, and strangled with wire nooses for their fur, which is often deliberately mislabeled as fur from another species.
PETA says it has also obtained undercover video footage that shows that fur farmers in China swing foxes and raccoon dogs by their hind legs and smash their heads into the ground, breaking the animals' necks but leaving them panting, blinking, and conscious as they are skinned alive.
