PETA accuses farm on Matt Lauer’s land of abusing sheep

In a newly posted “undercover” video, animal-rights activist group PETA is accusing farmers working at an operation in New Zealand of abusing sheep, stating that the farm is “literally soaked in” the blood of these animals. The owner of the property is Matt Lauer, the disgraced former host of NBC’s Today show.

The video targets the production of ZQ-certified wool, a certification that is listed as adhering to strict standards of animal welfare, environmental sustainability, fiber quality, traceability, and social responsibility. In the one-minute-long video, PETA describes the farm workers as “stepping on a thrashing sheep’s neck, dragging sheep across the floor, sewing up a sheep’s bloody wound without any painkillers, and other atrocities.”

New Zealand is the third-largest producer of wool in the world, accounting for nearly 10 percent of the global industry. PETA’s video specifically calls out top-tier clothing brands Smartwool, Helly Hansen, Fjällräven, and others as using ZQ-certified wool.



The workers are presented in the video as being part of an operation called Hunter Valley Farming, which leases out a portion of the 16,000-acre property in New Zealand owned by Lauer. Lauer himself is not unfamiliar to scandal — after more than two decades with NBC, he was released by the network in 2017 after it said it received “a detailed complaint from a colleague about inappropriate sexual behavior in the workplace” and added that NBC had “reason to believe this may not have been an isolated incident.”

Lauer, 67, has denied the allegations and was never charged, but he hasn’t been a prominent player in media since his dismissal from NBC. His New Zealand estate, which he bought the same year he left television, is known as Hunter Valley Station and includes a five-bedroom lakefront home.

“Matt Lauer’s New Zealand getaway is hell for scared sheep who are flung about, pinned down and cut up,” PETA president Ingrid Newkirk told The New York Post in an article. “PETA wants Lauer to wash his hands of the bloody wool business.”

PETA told The Post that it did not contact Lauer during its “undercover investigation” or before the video’s release — failure to inform owners or management in these instances is a common criticism of such activist videos. In almost all instances, suspected abuses are allowed to go on so that they can be filmed and used in an activist organization’s fundraising, though many details are left out of the released videos in their shortened “sharable” form.

The Post reported that one of Lauer’s representatives said after the release that Lauer “was deeply disturbed and saddened to hear of what allegedly has happened, and immediately launched his own investigation of his tenant’s operations, which is currently underway.”

The owners of Hunter Valley Farming said that the workers in the video are independent contractors specifically trained and hired for shearing. PETA has a long history of saying there is no humane way to harvest wool and that it is akin to the fur trade. In the past, the organization even went so far as to hire Australian musician Jona Weinhofen to pose with a plastic lamb covered in fake blood to sensationalize the effects of shearing on an animal.