Vermont Business Magazine After PETA shareda horrifyingvideo exposéof China's badger-brush industrywithThe Vermont Country Store, the Manchester-based retailer banned badger hair. According to the PETA report, its Asia's eyewitness investigation revealed that in order to make brushes used for shaving, makeup, and paint, badgers are captured using snares and other cruel methods while others are bred and confined to small wire cages on farms before being violently killed.
On Chinese badger-hair farms, PETA Asia documented that workers beat crying badgers over the head with anything that they could find, including a chair leg, before slitting their throats. One animal continued to move for a full minute after his throat had been cut, and another was missing a foot, which the farm owner attributed to a fight with a badger caged nearby, the PETA report stated.
"Badgers' lives aren't expendable, and these animals shouldn't be killed to make expendable goods," saidPETA Director of Corporate Affairs Anne Brainard. "PETA applauds The Vermont Country Store for its compassionate decision, which will prevent badgers from going insane inside tiny cages and being beaten to death in a horrendous industry that's thankfully losing customers quickly."
PETA said badgers are extremely social animals who, in nature, construct elaborate underground burrow systems, some of which are centuries old and have been inhabited by many generations of the same badger clan. They are fastidious and have separate rooms for sleeping and giving birth as well as designated outside "bathroom" areas.
Procter & Gamble, the parent company of The Art of Shaving, was the first company to ban badger-hair items after the release of PETA's video, and numerous others have followed suit, includingOlivina Men,Penhaligon's London,The New York Shaving Company,Beau Brummell, andBonanza. PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that "animals are not ours to abuse in any way"—is now calling onBaxter of CaliforniaandDick Blick Art Materialsto follow suit.
Source: PETA 10.8.2018.For more information, visitPETA.org.