After years of pressure from animal rights activists nationwide—including PETA—JCPenney has finally decided to stop peddling pelts.

PETA first wrote to JCPenney about its support of the cruel fur industry in 2001, and we have kept the pressure on the company ever since, including sending complaints to the company over its mislabeling of fur items.

In making this decision to become fur-free, JCPenney joins dozens of other major companies—including Calvin Klein, Tommy Hilfiger, Gap, Polo Ralph Lauren, Wet Seal, and Forever 21—that also refuse to sell the fur of abused animals. Like most modern retailers, these companies know that the fur trade is violent and bloody, and they refuse to support it. They know that animals who are trapped and farmed for their fur are often beaten to death, drowned, anally electrocuted, and skinned alive. They know that today's shoppers don't want to support this abuse, and they have responded by refusing to sell any fur, including fur trim.

Three cheers for JCPenney and everyone who helped persuade the company to become fur-free!

If you want to help PETA win more victories like this one, please take part in our current campaign to convince Giorgio Armani to become fur-free by using this automated form to write a letter to his company.

Posted by Matt Prescott

Having been on the receiving end of a few coolly worded e-mails from our Legal Department myself, I have a suspicion that JCPenney is in a world of pain after hearing from PETA's attorneys this week about the company's claim that it does not condone the “illegal or inhumane treatment of animals.” Given that this is pretty much the only response we get from JCPenney every time we try to talk to them about their refusal to stop selling fur, there's been a fair amount of head-scratching round here about what the hell the company thinks it's up to. Anyway, nobody likes to have to bring out the lawyers, but when your big-ass company is selling fur from places that have literally zero cruelty-to-animals laws and you have no publicly available standards of your own defining what you consider to be humane treatment, you just can't get away with telling consumers that you don't condone illegal or inhumane treatment of animals and expect people to let you go about your business as if nothing's wrong. So what's the deal, JCPenney? Does all your fur come from roadkill, maybe, or do you in fact pay people to rip it from the backs of defenseless, tortured animals just like everyone else who profits from the fur trade?