Pamela Anderson Appeals to Fashion Designers

Pamela Anderson is mostly known for her breasts and her tumultuous marriages (recently to Kid "do people still listen to me?" Rock). I had heard about her animal rights work with PETA, but it looks like she takes this a step further than just some public service announcements.

From the 2007 volume 1 newsletter from Vita, Center for Animal Rights Protection in Russia...

Internationally renowned television and film star Pamela Anderson - on behalf of People for the Ethical Treatment Animals (PETA) and the Moscow center for the protection of animal rights VITA - has sent a letter to Russia's top fashion designers, urging them to stop using fur. Enclosed with the letter is PETA's shocking video narrated by Anderson and dubbed into Russian - in which she describes the horrific suffering of animals caught in traps and raised on fur farms as graphic images of the animals' painful lives and deaths appear on the screen. Although Anderson has written to North American designers who use fur and even travelled to Paris to personally show the video to French designers, her letter marks the first time that a mailing of this type has been sent to Russian designers.

"It amazes me that some designers still turn animals into fashion victims",says Anderson. "I've written to them all to say, 'Foxes and chinchillas are anally electrocuted, beavers are drowned in underwater traps and minks are injected with weedkiller, all for a tacky coat that makes women look like Bigfoot!'"

In the video, Anderson takes viewers on a worldwide undercover tour of fur farms and trap lines. In Russia, wolves, beavers and raccoons are trapped, drowned and beaten to death in the wild, and in Europe and the US, chinchillas and minks suffer electrocution and neck-breaking on fur farms. In Korea, a top fur-producing nation, foxes are crushed between wooden
planks.

I really think Pamela Anderson should be commended for this work. She is talking about ugly, nightmarish practices that can't be easy to learn about and have in your psyche. Not usually stuff that stacked blondes are known for doing. Animal rights is probably the most thankless work because so much of your audience are self-absorbed "people only" types. Moreover, the victims themselves can't even thank you with a phone call or a letter. Someone like Pamela Anderson can choose to live a fluffy life filled with nothing but money and frivolity, but she chooses not to do so.

I have to admit that I'm impressed.