Trickster activists pretending to be from supermajor oil company TotalEnergies unveiled RéHabitat, a “habitat-equivalency” conservation program that would rescue animals from their East African Crude Oil Pipeline (EACOP) by relocating them to “more sustainable” habitats in France. To honor the occasion, handlers introduced a rooster—national bird of France—to an endangered silvery-cheeked hornbill imported from East Africa, in a moment of symbolic welcome... which went very wrong.
The "grand guignol-esque" hoax was orchestrated The Fixers, an emergent faction of the Yes Men. RéHabitat was designed to expose TotalEnergies' greenwashing efforts to cleanse their image while engineering ecological collapse through dirty oil and gas projects. The action was also meant to implicate banks—including Standard Bank, ICBC, and SMBC—for financing the pipeline and the devastation it will create.