Orangutan Outreach Website - Saving the Orangutan

Chicago-based emo-punk band Fall Out Boy (FOB) recently released a video for their single ‘Thnks fr the mmrs’ that features clothes-wearing chimpanzees and orangutans.

The endangered great apes are portrayed as directing the band’s music video, playing drums and doing the band’s make-up.

In August the band arrived at the Kerrang music awards in London with a macaque monkey. TV footage of the awards shows the monkey being paraded on band members’ shoulders in front of crowds of fans and in the scrum of journalists vying to interview the band.

It also transpires that FOB took a Capuchin monkey to the MTV awards last year.

Appalling as this is, what makes it even more surprising is that the band has been publicly supportive of animal rights campaigns so should know better!

Fortunately these latest stunts have proved unpopular with some FOB fans who have criticised the bands use of primates on various internet forums. However, some fans have enjoyed seeing the primates and have even asked where they can buy one as a pet.

The Captive Animals’ Protection Society (CAPS) has worked for years to discourage people from keeping primates as pets as well as campaigning to end the use of animals in advertising and music videos and is appalled to see such a popular band, with a huge young fan base, using animals in this way.

CAPS is co-ordinating a campaign on behalf of the Ape Alliance, a network of international animal protection and primate conservation organizations, to encourage Fall Out Boy to stop using primates.

Orangutan Outreach supports CAPS efforts and asks everyone to please write to the band’s manager, encouraging the band not to support cruelty to animals in the name of entertainment and to have the video edited to take out the parts showing great apes being humiliated. Please be polite as disrespect will get us nowhere. Thanks…

Contact:
Doug Newman
Manager - Fall Out Boy
Crush Media Management
584 Broadway, Suite 1102, New York, NY 10012, USA
E-mail: doug@crushmm.com

To see a ‘remixed‘ version of ‘Thnks fr the mmrs’ on YouTube, which combines the band’s video with clips of how primates are sometimes abused for ‘entertainment’
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQXqmNCwAZ0

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 9th, 2007 at 8:18 pm and is filed under Campaigns, Take action!, Video clips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.