Coach’s New York headquarters was the site of a surprise sensory onslaught today, as dozens of PETA supporters took over the building lobby during the company’s annual meeting calling for an end to its sales of animal- and planet-killing leather. Demonstrators chanted through megaphones, deployed noisemakers, wrote “Leather Kills” on the building’s front windows, and posed as a “dead window display” with a bloody “cow head.” The building was locked down, and two protesters were arrested while shouting, “Coach has blood on its hands!” peta2, PETA’s youth division, also joined in on the action as part of its campaign calling on Coachtopia—the brand’s latest attempt to pander to Gen Z—to stop marketing ground-up leather scraps as “sustainable.”
During the meeting, PETA confronted Coach leadership with a question on behalf of PETA’s fellow shareholders: “Leather is cruel. Cows are castrated, branded, and tail-docked—often without painkillers; alligators flail after their necks are hacked; ostriches have their feathers ripped from their bodies; snakes are skinned while moving. These are present-day industry nightmares. Coach says it wants a better-made future. It can do that using innovative materials that don’t come from animals. When will our company’s action match its words and replace these cruel products with innovative, vegan ones?”
“Leather is the new fur, and just like fur, it was sliced off the bodies of suffering animals who lived their entire lives in misery,” says PETA Executive Vice President Tracy Reiman. “PETA is calling on Coach to get animals’ skin off its shelves and urges compassionate shoppers to buy only kind and luxurious vegan materials.”
Cows have friends, hold grudges against other cows, and mourn when a loved one dies or when they’re separated from each other. A PETA exposé of the world’s largest leather processor—which has been linked to Coach—showed that workers brand calves on the face, beat cows and bulls, and shock them with electric prods. The leather industry also contributes to climate catastrophe, land devastation, deforestation, pollution, water contamination, and biodiversity loss.
Today’s attention-grabbing demonstration was a preview of PETA’s inaugural Free the Animals Friday, a Black Friday event in which PETA supporters will converge on Coach stores across the country with a series of eye-popping protests encouraging holiday shoppers to avoid cruel leather and choose compassionate vegan options instead.
Coach action. Image Credit – PETA
Coach action. Image Credit – PETA
Coach action. Image Credit – PETA
Coach action. Image Credit – PETA
Banner Image: Free the Animals Friday. Image Credit – PETA
People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) is the largest animal rights organization in the world, and PETA entities have more than 9 million members and supporters globally.
PETA opposes speciesism, a human-supremacist worldview, and focuses its attention on the four areas in which the largest numbers of animals suffer the most intensely for the longest periods of time: in laboratories, in the food industry, in the clothing trade, and in the entertainment business. We also work on a variety of other issues, including the cruel killing of rodents, birds, and other animals who are often considered “pests” as well as cruelty to domesticated animals.
PETA works through public education, investigative newsgathering and reporting, research, animal rescue, legislation, special events, celebrity involvement, and protest campaigns.
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