• by Sarah Mahoney  @mahoney_sarah, September 6, 2017

Trendy outerwear company Canada Goose unveiled its first-ever knitwear collection earlier this month, only to be targeted by a hard-hitting parody video from the People for Ethical Treatment of Animals. 

PETA’s stance is that there is no such thing as humane wool, and the video includes graphic images of sheep being punched, kicked and slashed as they are sheared by brutal handlers.

“There’s nothing warm and fuzzy about the fur industry,” says Ben Williamson, a PETA spokesperson. “So when we saw the video Canada Goose was using to introduce its new line of knitwear, saying it went back to the origins of the product, we decided to take it all the way to the sheep.” 

Canada Goose says the video is misleading. "The graphic footage included in the contrived video is not from Canada Goose's wool supply chain,” it says in a statement. “We only source our wool through farms in Argentina that are strictly regulated. We do not condone any willful mistreatment or neglect of animals, or acts that maliciously cause undue pain, injury or suffering."

To date, PETA has released seven exposes of wool, Williamson tells Marketing Daily, “and each has revealed that sheep are mutilated and abused, even for supposedly ‘sustainable’ wool.” He also says PETA's exposé in Australia resulted in the “first-ever convictions anywhere in the world of wool-industry workers for abusing sheep.”

It’s not the first time PETA has targeted the Toronto-based company, calling it out for its use of down and the coyote fur it uses in its parkas. This week, actress Pamela Anderson, the group’s honorary director, emailed 800 Canada Goose employees a video of a coyote being shot by a trapper, urging them to “use their insider advantage” to persuade the company to switch to synthetic fur.

With some $400 million in annual sales, Canada Goose is a relatively minor player in the apparel business. But the 60-year-old brand has courted the celebrity crowd that may be more sensitive to activist pleas from groups like PETA, which took credit for ending the brand’s sponsorship of the Berlin Film Festival. 

Canada Goose still sponsors both the Sundance and Toronto film festivals, and celebrities like Kate Upton, Jimmy Fallon and Emma Stone have been photographed wearing the ultra-warm parkas.

PETA has had some success pressuring companies to change policies. In the past, for example, it has targeted Uniqlo, which later phased out buying wool from sheep that had been subject to a practice known as mulesing, cutting strips of flesh from their hind ends to prevent insect infestation.