By:Candace Zawowski
VFA Reindeer Protest Sears in Special Holiday In-Store Action
At approximately 2 PM on Saturday, December 1st, VFA activists converged at Sears at the Ross Park Mall to hold a special holiday in-store action. We donned antlers for the holidays to represent Caribou (as reindeer are known in their wild habitat) and wore T-shirts proclaiming "Sears is Destroying Our Home". Leashing ourselves together, we sprang out of the aisles and pranced through Sears singing a newly-invented Christmas carol, "Sears is Cutting Down Forests for Catalogs" to the tune of "Winter Wonderland", in order to educate Sears' shoppers about the store's destructive catalog production practices. We circled around the main floor of Sears 4 or 5 times, going through several rounds of the carol before a store security guard escorted us toward the mall exit. We then slowly proceeded to walk through the mall, making our way to the opposite mall exit. The entire time we kept singing our carol to the crowds of holiday mall shoppers: "Hi there all, we are reindeer, there is something we need you to hear, it's important info, you really must know, Sears is cutting down forests for catalogs." The shoppers overall seemed very receptive and even seemed glad that we were there. Many of the shoppers stopped to listen to us, smiling, and several even applauded as we came marching by.
Starting the National Day of Action Against Sears 3 days early, we wanted to let Sears customers know that the reindeer we represented are in serious peril, as destruction of their forest habitat has now caused the animals to become highly endangered. The "reindeer" sang, "Over 400 million catalogs a year, on mostly unrecycled paper too, destroying forests makes animals disappear, if Sears doesn't change us reindeer will be through." After walking around the mall for nearly ten minutes, mall security and the Ross Township police detained us reindeer and requested that we leave the premises.
The company, with catalog offerings including Sears, Land's End and the recently acquired K-Mart, ranks among the top catalog producers in North America. Each year Sears mails over 425 million catalogs made up of trees cut from Endangered Forests, and made of little to no recycled content.
Sears/Land's End catalog practices are having a devastating effect on the last remaining Endangered Forests, including the North American Boreal. The Boreal is home to hundreds of First Nations indigenous communities, and it provides critical habitat for half of North America's species of migrating songbirds as well as caribou.
