RELATED: Target Is Permanently Barring Shoppers From Doing This. CVS is pulling a number of cards from its greeting card aisle. According to People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), the pharmacy chain banned cards featuring great apes wearing costumes, displayed in studios, or interacting with humans following protests from the organization. CVS has banned the cards from its nearly 10,000 stores, and PETA says that most cards have already been removed. Best Life has reached out to CVS to confirm that these cards have been pulled from shelves and banned, but has not yet heard back. RELATED: Walmart Won’t Accept This From Customers, Starting Dec. 15. According to PETA, unnatural images of great apes, like chimpanzees, “mislead consumers” into believing that the species is doing well. But all chimpanzees have been classified as endangered by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service since 2015. And the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) has warned that all Great Ape species are at very high risk of extinction in the wild in the near future, possibly within our lifetime.ae0fcc31ae342fd3a1346ebb1f342fcb PETA also notes that portrayals of chimpanzees in these greeting cards could increase the demand for buying endangered great apes as “pets” on the black market, which is a major force leading them toward extinction. “Chimpanzees aren’t models or props, and photos of them wearing Santa hats or sitting at the holiday table put these endangered animals at risk,” PETA Executive Vice President Tracy Reiman said in a statement. While CVS is the most recent retailer to pull these greeting cards from its shelves, it’s not the first. Rite Aid removed all great ape greeting cards from its stores earlier this year. In March, the pharmacy chain pulled cards that included images of chimpanzees, orangutans, and other great apes in what PETA referred to as “demeaning, clownish images” after protests from the animal rights organization, Penn Live reported. “In regards to your request to remove any greeting cards featuring great apes, please know we are removing any such cards from our inventory as quickly as possible,” Andre Persaud, executive vice president of retail at Rite Aid, said in a statement to PETA at the time. “We have contacted our supplier American Greetings, and they will be removing all cards featuring great apes from our stores during their next service call.” RELATED: For more retail news delivered straight to your inbox, sign up for our daily newsletter. At the moment, there are still plenty of these greeting cards being sold. PETA is urging American Greetings to stop manufacturing and selling cards with unnatural great ape images, and Walgreens has asked Hallmark to stop selling such cards in its U.S. stores. Julia Gallucci, a primatologist with PETA, told Penn Live that the organization is only against media portraying these animals as being cute and cuddly or being held, as opposed to sitting in their wild habitat. “We have no problem with greeting cards that feature natural depictions of great apes,” Gallucci said. “That’s very, very different from a chimpanzee drinking a beer, wearing a birthday hat, or wearing sunglasses. It can celebrate them for what they really are, which is this very interesting, magnificent, socially complex, emotionally complex species. They’re our closest living relative and worthy of respect, rather than just being sort of a caricature of a human.” RELATED: Publix Says It’s Limiting These 15 Items, Effective Immediately.
