ARKANSAS, USA — The People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) organization is celebrating another victory in their fight to remove images of great apes from greeting cards. This time, the giant Northwest Arkansas retailer, Walmart, has banned these cards and pulled them from their shelves at the behest of PETA.
This comes two years after PETA got CVS to pull greeting cards featuring great apes wearing costumes from its shelves and a year after American Greetings also agreed to stop selling similar cards.
Banning great apes from greeting cards has been part of PETA's campaign to stop speciesism, a term they have come to define as “the human-held belief that all other animal species are inferior.”
The cards that were pulled from Walmart allegedly featured apes "dressed in costumes and party hats and displaying the misunderstood 'fear grimace'" PETA said.
"Continuing to exploit endangered chimpanzees for profit is a form of speciesism—a human-supremacist worldview," PETA said when it announced that CVS had removed greeting cards with pictures of the endangered species from its shelves.
According to PETA, featuring and mocking great apes hinders the conservation of the extinguishing species and showing the animals interacting with people misleads consumers into thinking the species is thriving.
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