Video: PETA Exposes Horrific Cruelty in Frog Leg Industry
Protesters to Deliver Formal Complaint Monday
Jakarta – An explosive new video exposé released today by PETA reveals rampant abuse in the frog-meat industry, with workers capturing frogs in their natural habitat and stuffing them into crowded sacks – where many slowly suffocate – dismembering them, and skinning frogs who are still alive. Indonesia is the world’s largest exporter of frogs’ legs, selling up to hundreds of millions of them to distributors in the European Union (EU) every year.
PETA investigators visited seven frog-meat operations in Indonesia and discovered that live frogs are kept in cramped sacks, sometimes for as long as two days. One worker who was sorting through the captured frogs slammed the live ones onto the ground and admitted that she didn’t want to take the time to separate the living frogs from the dead ones. Other workers used knives to hack at frogs’ heads and feet. Some were hacked repeatedly, while other frogs weren’t fully decapitated before workers ripped off their skin. Investigators also recorded that frogs’ mouths continued to open and close after decapitation and that their headless bodies were still jumping or moving minutes later.
On Monday, PETA protesters holding signs will deliver a formal complaint, a copy of which was sent via e-mail, to the Directorate General of Nature Resources and Ecosystem Conservation, Ministry of Environment and Forestry of Indonesia.
When: 12 p.m. 11 December 2023
“From sealed-up sacks writhing with bouncing bodies to workers’ hacking at heads on blood-stained chopping boards, the frog-meat industry is the stuff of nightmares,” says PETA Senior Vice President Jason Baker. “PETA is calling on local authorities to stop this horrific abuse and urges everyone to help prevent frogs from suffering by going vegan.”
The two species of frogs caught by workers, the fanged river frog and the crab-eating frog, are both experiencing population declines. Although the fanged river frog isn’t permitted to be captured in nature, PETA points out that Indonesian suppliers deliberately mislabel and export the species. According to Eurostat, the EU imported an estimated 77 million pounds of frogs’ legs between 2010 and 2022, which is equal to about 703 million to 1.7 billion frogs.
Images from the investigation are available here, and broadcast-quality footage is available here. It is also available here on YouTube.
PETA Asia – whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to eat or abuse in any way” – opposes speciesism, a human-supremacist worldview. For more information, please visit PETAAsia.com or follow the group on X (formerly Twitter), Facebook, or Instagram.
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