Fur Free Life Campaign 2015-2016
An Animal Rights Article from All-Creatures.org

FROM

ACTAsia
April 2016

 A 15 second video was created and displayed for a week, 30 times each day, on more than 100,000 LED screens across 100 cities throughout China. The estimated reach was approximately 300 million viewers, which is more than the populations of the UK, Germany, Italy and France combined, and almost as much as the entire population of the USA!

Watch the video here.

This year, our Fur Free Life campaign has taken a new focus. While animal suffering and the lack of animal protection legislation remain at the heart of our campaign for a Fur Free Life, our educational publicity has recently concentrated on the serious health risks for wearers of fur.

victims of fur
Dead albino minks...

We kicked-off our campaign by adding Chinese-subtitles to the German documentary ‘The Truth about Fur’. During the winter months ACTAsia held 12 screenings in 11 cities across China with more scheduled for the remainder of the year. Each time, the audience showed great interest and spoke eagerly about their personal experiences with fur.

toxic fur

Our next phase of campaigning came up against a hurdle when the media declined to publish an article written by ACTAsia. The article was intended to inform consumers of fur about the risks to their own health, exposed by European research studies, but was deemed by the media as ‘too critical of the fur industry’. Read POISON FUR (pdf) here.

toxic fur

But this barrier to education was not enough to stop a very successful campaign from unfolding. Extensive online promotion of the article and an effective billboard advertising campaign was launched, as well as a series of adverts on the handles of public buses. As a result, our online article received a total of more than 26.000 visits online.

In Beijing a passerby made the following statement:

Mr. Gaiqun Guo said he was ‘so happy to see the toxic fur advertising in the Dongwuyuan station (Beijing, below a huge shopping mall), because the shopping mall upstairs has many shops that sell a lot of fur’. He commented that it was very wise to let people know about toxic chemicals in fur, and this was a good choice of location.

In order to further build on the campaign, Focus Media kindly donated space and time through their LED screens situated across China. A 15 second video was created and displayed for a week, 30 times each day, on more than 100,000 LED screens across 100 cities throughout China. The estimated reach was approximately 300 million viewers, which is more than the populations of the UK, Germany, Italy and France combined, and almost as much as the entire population of the USA!

raccoon dog fur

The grande finale to the 2015-16 Fur Free Campaign was our Fur Free Fashion Show, held in Shanghai, the fashion capital of China, only a week before the city’s official fashion week. Among the 340 guests were also Consulate representatives from Poland and the UK, event partners such as LUSH cosmetics and celebrities such as actors Jackie Lui from Hong Kong and Eric Lee, from Taiwan. A total of 17 designers participated from 8 countries to help ACTAsia promote a cruelty-free lifestyle to over 800 million consumers as an ethical and trendy alternative. [Read 3rd International Fur Free Fashion Show Held in Shanghai]


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