After PETA, the world’s largest animal rights organisation shared a video exposé of China’s badger-brush industry with NARS Cosmetics, the Shiseido subsidiary will no longer use badger-hair in its makeup brushes.
Commenting on NARS addition to PETA’s list of more than 90 companies which have banned the use of badger hair in their products (mainly makeup, paint and shaving brushes), PETA corporate affairs director Anne Brainard says “no brush is worth tormenting and killing a sensitive wild animal.”
“Every badger-hair brush represents the miserable death of a sensitive animal,” she says.
“By banning the sale of badger-hair brushes, NARS is helping PETA push the cosmetics industry in a kinder direction.”
PETA Asia’s investigation revealed that badgers in China, the world’s biggest producer of badger hair, are “captured using snares and other cruel methods while others are bred and confined to small wire cages on farms before being violently killed”.
According to PETA, the organisation’s eyewitnesses visited badger-hair farms around China where on “every farm, they documented hellish living conditions”:
“Badgers are extremely social animals who, in nature, construct elaborate underground burrow systems called setts Some setts are centuries old and have been inhabited by many generations of the same badger clan. These fastidious animals have separate rooms for sleeping and giving birth as well as designated “bathroom” areas outside the setts.
“But on badger hair farms these animals are deprived of the opportunity to dig, forage for food, choose mates, or do anything else that would make their lives worth living, causing many to go insane—continually pacing back and forth and spinning in circles inside their cages
“To kill them, workers bashed the badgers in the head with whatever object was handy. One badger was hit in the head with a chair leg. Because he was too frightened to leave his cage, workers hit him again, causing him to fall onto the floor, after which they cut his throat and left him to bleed out in excruciating pain, like all the other badgers killed before them.
Procter & Gamble, the parent company of The Art of Shaving, was the first company to ban badger-hair items after the release of PETA Asia’s video last September.
Since then nearly 90 others have followed suit including Morphe, Crown and The New York Shaving Company – and PETA is now calling on other cosmetic, paint and shaving brush companies to do the same.
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