Overstock.com agrees to ban sales of exotic animal-skin products

Overstock.com Inc., the online discount retailer, says it no longer will be offering for sale products that are made from the skins of snakes, sharks, eels, stingrays, ostriches or other exotic animals.

The Salt Lake City-based company said it decided to take the action on its Web site after People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, or PETA, showed it the methods some processors use to harvest the skins.

“While I understand that not all processors employ these methods, we are removing these products from our Web site and committing not to sell them in the future,” Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne said in a statement announcing the ban.

Overstock has taken such action before.

In 2008, it banned the sale of apparel and accessory products made from fur. It also banned the sale of ivory products, said Stormy Simon, Overstock’s vice president of marketing and customer care.

“We’re doing this because we think it is the right thing to do,” Simon said.

Efforts to contact the Leather Industries of America and other associations representing the processing industry for comment were unsuccessful.

PETA approached Overstock in November as part of a wider effort to curb the sale of products made from exotic-animal skins, said Melissa Wilson, spokeswoman for the animal rights organization.

“We have been approaching companies that have taken positive actions in the past and shown their willingness to help end the suffering of animals,” Wilson said. “Overstock is one of those companies that has taken a leadership role.”

Wilson said PETA recently released the results of a new investigation that she contends exposes the extreme suffering caused by the exotic-skins industry – video footage that she believes helped convince Overstock to implement the ban.

“Our video footage shows just some of the atrocities that take place,” she said.

The sale of animal-skin products that included shoes, boots and watchbands was a very small percentage of Overstock’s business, far less than 1 percent, Simon said. “We no longer are carrying any inventories of those products. It was such a small amount that getting rid of it wasn’t an issue for us or any of our suppliers.”