With beach season in full swing, four billboards are popping up around Hampton Roads, Virginia, this week calling on residents and tourists alike to join the nationwide campaign urging Virginia Beach-based souvenir chain Sunsations to take wild hermit crabs off its shelves. TAKE ACTION TODAY: Give Sunsations' corporate office a call at 757-422-5739 (option 0) to tell it to stop selling hermit crabs (use our sample script below)!
The billboards feature an image of caged, crowded hermit crabs captured inside one local Sunsations store last summer alongside the text, “Wild hermit crabs don’t belong on our boardwalk,” and direct onlookers to HermitCrabFreedom.com, where they can add their name to our petition signed by over 50,000 people like you asking the souvenir giant to stop selling crabs.
The boards, a joint initiative by hermit crab advocacy group Plight of the Hermies and Hampton Roads VegFest, are the latest action in a year-long campaign comprising protests at local Sunsations stores, call-in days, and the distribution of thousands of postcards to tourists. Funding for this project was generously provided by A Seed of Change.
Hermit crabs are complex animals who thrive in large colonies in their natural habitat, the tropical seashore. But every single land hermit crab sold in souvenir shops like Sunsations has been caught from the wild, as these animals do not breed readily in captivity. At the boardwalk, hermit crabs are sold to tourists in tiny, barren cages and typically die in mere months—much sooner than their 30-year natural lifespan.
Help drive the message home TODAY! Give Sunsations' corporate office a call at 757-422-5739 (option 0) using our sample script below or your own polite message. Don't forget to let us know how it went by emailing contact@plightofthehermies.org!
SAMPLE SCRIPT: Hi, my name is ____ and I'm calling as a concerned consumer to urge you to end the sale of hermit crabs. Video footage has documented crabs in crowded, barren cages with broken limbs - a sign of severe stress - in your stores. Hermit crabs are delicate wild animals who are ripped from the seashore to be sold in tiny cages, where they will perish in months instead of their 30-year lifespan. I will not shop at Sunsations until you stop selling these wild animals. Thank you.