PARIS — Add another weighty subject to the roster of sustainability issues taken on by Kering: animal welfare.
“We wanted really to have a specific focus on animal welfare, seeing it’s an important topic also for ethical purposes,” said Marie-Claire Daveu, the luxury group’s chief sustainability officer. A former French civil servant who once worked in the government’s ecology ministry, Daveu spoke to WWD from her office at Kering’s headquarters; a fuzzy goat statuette sat on the book-lined shelves.
The company is releasing detailed guidelines on the topic today — a several-hundred page document outlining standards for cattle, calves, goats, sheep, ostriches, crocodiles and alligators, pythons, farmed fur and abattoirs — open-sourced, in keeping with other company efforts related to sustainability.
It outlines measures aimed at ensuring certain levels of animal comfort, divided into different levels — gold, silver and bronze, with bronze largely corresponding to European rules, and sometimes going a bit further.
Measures include providing animals with access to food and water, maintaining appropriate weight levels — not too fat, not too skinny —taking care to reduce stress during transportation and keeping them from going lame.
To cite a handful of examples, the gold standard for goats includes giving them a place to “practice
Kering Trains Sights on Animal Welfare With New Guidelines
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