Pamela Anderson Urges Manmohan Singh to Reject All Leather Products

Hollywood star Pamela Anderson, in India for a stint on the reality show Bigg Boss 4, fired off a letter to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on November 15, 2010, urging him to call on Indians to reject all leather products.

The former Baywatch star, a longtime PETA activist, wrote that she was "calling on every kind person in India and throughout the world to join me in rejecting all leather products in order to help put an end to the suffering. I am asking every individual — man, woman and child — never to buy leather shoes, bags, jackets, belts or anything else made of animal skin."

It was not her first engagement with the issue. A decade earlier, in 2000, Anderson had narrated a PETA video exposing cruelty in the Indian leather trade. In her letter she wrote that India's reverence for animals was deeply moving, yet the leather trade — including illegal slaughterhouses — continued to operate "in unspeakably cruel ways," and that ten years on, little had changed. She asked the government to act to help the cattle.

Anderson spent three days in the Bigg Boss house and took the opportunity to practice what she preached: a strict vegan, she had a suitcase of non-leather shoes made by Indian designer Rina Shah brought to her and reportedly carried them home.

The letter was classic celebrity advocacy — a famous face attached to a cause in the country where she was briefly a guest. Whether letters to prime ministers change trade policy is an open question. But the leather trade's record, which Anderson's letter described in unsparing terms, remains a genuine scandal, and the celebrities who keep raising it are not wrong about the facts.

IANS reported the letter at the time.