Today, Ben Wallace and the Ministry of Defence (MoD) were put on the spot when PETA supporters unfurled a 10-metre banner off Westminster Bridge with a pointed message for the defence minister: stop telling bear-faced lies. A faux fur exists – use it!
PETA is calling out Ben Wallace for misleading the public about the suitability of the faux bear fur the group has helped create to replace the bearskins used to make the Queen’s Guard’s caps. Although the faux fur matches the exact length of real bear fur, performs similarly in “water shedding” tests, and is 100% waterproof, the MoD disingenuously claims that no suitable non-animal alternative is available. The MoD nose it’s also misleading the public about the killing of the bears whose skin is used for the caps.
More images are available here.
“A humane replacement for the bear fur used for the Queen’s Guard’s caps now exists, but Ben Wallace and the MoD are stonewalling it,” says PETA Senior Campaigns Manager Kate Werner. “PETA is calling on the ministry to stop telling bear-faced lies and make the switch to faux fur for this ornamental headwear.”
PETA notes that it takes the skin of at least one bear to make a single cap. Some bears are shot several times before they die, and some escape only to bleed to death. When mother bears are killed, their cubs are left to starve. Despite th MoD’s claims that bears are killed as part of Canadian government culls, PETA has found no evidence that any culls of this sort exist in any province or territory of Canada.
Wallace has a long history of actively opposing any switch to faux fur for the caps. PETA has launched a government e-petition on the issue, which, if it reaches 100,000 signatures, will trigger a parliamentary debate, restoring the power to the British public to demand a modern, humane alternative that would save taxpayers money and spare bears’ lives.
For more information about the misinformation peddled by the MoD about the use of bearskins, please see here. PETA – whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to wear” – opposes speciesism, a human-supremacist worldview.
