You might want to sit down for this major news update: After more than 100 years, the animals on the packaging of Barnum’s Animal Crackers are now free to roam across the lush wilderness of their Nabisco box, no longer confined behind their circus cages.
BEHOLD THEIR PROWESS:
The once-confined creatures are now free thanks to the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), which had sent a letter to Nabisco’s parent company, Mondelēz International, in 2016 demanding they remove the bars from the packaging and take a stand against “the egregious cruelty inherent in circuses that use animals and the public’s swelling opposition to the exploitation of animals used for entertainment.”
“No living being exists simply to be a spectacle or to perform tricks for human entertainment, yet all circuses and traveling shows that use animals treat them as mere props, denying them everything that’s natural and important to them,” PETA said in a statement Monday.
Mondelēz took the letter seriously and removed its zoo animals from their boxcar cages and let them all hang out together in the open plains.
“When PETA reached out about Barnum’s, we saw this as another great opportunity to continue to keep this brand modern and contemporary,” Jason Levine, Mondelēz’s chief marketing officer for North America, said in a statement.