Wearing nothing more than reptilian scales as she swims through a lush lake, Torrey DeVitto appears as a crocodile in a brand-new PETA campaign that asks, “Whose Skin Are You In? Choose Fake Snake and Mock Croc. Wear Vegan.”
In an exclusive interview with PETA, the Pretty Little Liars and Chicago Med star explains why she’s eager to speak up for reptiles killed for their skins. “[Workers] don’t even kill them—they just hit them over the head with metal bats or stab them in the neck,” she says. “Most of the time these animals are still breathing and still living when they get their skin taken from them, and it takes about three to four alligators or crocodiles to make just one bag. It’s absolutely unnecessary.”
PETA — whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to wear” — recently released an exposé revealing that reptiles were trapped in barren and severely crowded pits on farms that supply crocodile and alligator skins to Hermès-owned tanneries. Workers shot alligators in the head with a captive-bolt gun and, as DeVitto describes, sawed open the back of the animals’ necks with a box cutter to sever their blood vessels. Previous PETA exposés have revealed that snakes, alligators, and other exotic animals who are killed for their skins are commonly nailed to trees, bludgeoned with hammers, and skinned alive.
