Celebrity Big Brother gossip
What was Pete's coat made of?
So, it turns out that
Pete Burns's coat wasn't, in fact, made from gorillas. Instead, it has been created from beautiful black and white colobus monkeys, which live in Africa.
Officers swooped on the
Big Brother house yesterday to remove the coat for testing, following a series of complaints from viewers. If the coat had been made of gorilla fur, Pete could have been in breach of endangered animals laws. But the matter has now been passed to the Crown Prosecution Service to decide whether the coat contravenes importation rules.
Experts from the Natural History Museum in London analysed the coat and said it was in a "relatively poor condition". It had also been relined at some point. But the colobus monkey is still an endangered animal - and dealing in their fur carries a penalty of up to five years. Ian Redmond, chief of the UN's Great Apes Survival Project, said: "Regardless of legal issues, there's a moral issue too because Pete and Channel 4 could be said to have promoted the killing of wild animals for fashion." Maybe the police should have swapped the coat for a real gorilla - then we could all have seen how Pete would like that.