Truth or dare?
Dare: skin your pet and wear it.
No? Ok lets go for truth….
The current status of fur trade….
Although sales of real fur have been declining, the market demand is still high and remains a lucrative source of income for many countries; you only have to take a look around on the high street in winter season and you’ll notice plush pom pom hats, trimmed handbags and pumped up puffer jackets. According to the Fur Institute of Canada, fur trade contributes $1 billion to the Canadian economy each year with trappers/fur farm owners bringing home an annual income of over $320 million.
What’s more gobsmacking is that, in retaliation to the increasing number of luxury brands and retailers banning fur/exotic skins, the fur industry is promoting skins as a ‘sustainable and natural option’. In particular, it is stressing the ‘material’s long lifecycle, the fact that it’s biodegradable and the absence of harsh chemicals in its processing as proof’. Whilst some of these facts might be true, fur trade is a tragic industry and there are four important reasons to watch your fashion labels closely and campaign against it.
1. Animal welfare - what welfare?
85% of fur skins originate from factory farms where minks, foxes and other animals are locked up in cramped, torturous conditions to live out their short-lived lives before being killed. These fur farms exist in countries all over the world including 22 EU countries (which account for 50% of global production), the US, Canada and China.
On these farms, given the video footage, it is clear regulations are lax. Animals are constrained from exhibiting their natural behaviours; they cannot ‘play, hunt, jump or run’ leading many to show signs of neurotic behaviour. ‘Fighting, self-mutilation and cannibalism’ as well as a host of infections and sores are also common due to the unsanitary conditions in which they are kept. Equally shocking are the methods used to kill these animals, including vaginal or anal electrocution, gassing or poisoning. Skinning alive is another possibility if animals are unlucky enough to survive. This is often because they must be ‘killed in a way that will not harm their pelts’.
Despite so-called welfare certification schemes in Europe such as Welfur vowing to ensure their products are animal welfare friendly, at an EU roundtable discussion, a veterinarian professor pointed out that these
‘do not measure or tell us anything meaningful about the welfare of these animals in scientific, absolute terms, they simply measure how farms compare with each other in the context of a fundamentally inadequate farming environment’.
The remainder of fur skins are derived from trapping, a similarly barbaric activity. Steel-jaw traps slam down on victims’ limbs leaving them struggling for hours until they eventually succumb to exhaustion, frostbite, shock and death; pole traps operate in a similar way but hoist their victims into the air where they are left to hang by their appendages; and conibear traps crush animals’ necks with ’90 pounds of pressure per square inch’ leading to death by suffocation. The majority of these wild-trapped animals come from the US, Canada and Russia.
2. Complex supply chains and misinformation
Even if you are gullible enough to believe in these quite frankly laughable certification schemes, due to the globalization of fur trade, it is difficult for consumers to know where their fur originates and thereby the conditions its owner has been subjected too. As emphasized by PETA, skins are transported through international auction houses, purchased, and distributed to manufacturers around the world where finished goods are sometimes also exported. This means ‘even if a fur garment’s label says that it was made in a European country, the animals were likely raised and slaughtered elsewhere’. What is more unnerving is that there has been recent evidence of fur being mislabelled by retailers including House of Fraser and Misguided as faux fur.
3. Environment - greenhouse gases and a nasty cocktail of all sorts!
Despite the fur industry promoting skins as sustainable owing to their durable nature, the Advertising Standards Committee (ASA) have concluded otherwise. After receiving a complaint from the Global Action in the Interest of Animals about the European Fur Breeders’ Association magazine campaign titled ‘Why its eco-friendly to wear fur’, the ASA banned the ad stating their investigation did not show that the fur trade would ‘cause no environmental damage’.
Clearly, whether fur is more sustainable than its non-fur counterparts is a different question. However, according to the MTT Agrifood Research Finland, which published a life cycle assessment (LCA) of mink and fox pelts:
‘The carbon footprint of a mink skin is almost equal to the daily footprint of an average Finnish consumer, and the footprint of a fox skin is approximately three days’ worth. The footprints of fur alternatives are much smaller.’
An LCA assessment by CE Delft also found that compared to the highest scoring textile (wool), an equivalent weight of fur had at least a five times higher climate change impact due to the production of animal feed and manure emissions.
Furthermore, whilst the fur industry highlights their coats as being ‘biodegradable’ and devoid of harsh chemicals, this cannot be further from the truth as an inherent part of animal skinning involves treating pelt with chemicals to prevent it from decaying. Even the World Bank, a fairly neutral group in contrast to animal rights organisations, ranked fur dressing as one of the world’s five worst industries for toxic-metal pollution. The chemicals used including formaldehyde and chromium pose a serious risk to health as both are well known carcinogens. Not only do these chemicals affect the workers, harmful levels of toxics in fur trims have also been identified on children’s fashion wear by independent laboratories in China, Italy, The Netherlands and Germany.
4. Disease - Covid-19 and zoonotic disease
Finally, it is well known now that the Covid-19 (most likely) originated from a “wet market” in Wuhan, China, rather than a fur farm. Nevertheless, both represent a hotbed for new and dangerous infections as both keep human and non-human animals-alive, dead, and dying-in close proximity. This close proximity in turn, encourages viral pathogens to intermingle, ‘swap bits of their genetic code’ and ‘mutate in ways that make them more transmissible between species’. Given that 60% of all human diseases and around 75% of emerging infectious diseases are zoonotic, as well as the pandemonium and 774K deaths caused by this pandemic, this should be reason alone to give up fur.
A more positive outlook
After a rather disturbing read, I would like to end on a more optimistic note. Whilst there is a long way to go before furs remain permanently attached to their rightful owners, thankfully momentum seems to be building in the right direction.
Owing to increased negative publicity,
- some countries and states in the US (California, Los Angeles, San Francisco, São Paulo and Brazil) have passed legislation that will ban the sale and manufacture of new fur clothing and accessories beginning on January 1, 2023;
- many have decided to ban fur farming (Slovakia, Serbia, Luxembourg, Norway, Croatia, Czech Republic, Macedonia, Slovenia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Japan, Austria, UK and Belgium); and
- others (India, Netherlands, Denmark, Hungary, Sweden, Switzerland, Italy and Germany) have implemented partial bans and strict regulations resulting in farms becoming economically unviable.
Justice Champions is striving to achieve a voice for the silenced and offer an innovative approach to ensure campaigning clients use the courts to achieve maximum impact. If you or anyone you know have been arrested or are facing criminal proceedings as a result of campaign action against the fur trade, please get in touch.
To learn more about the cases we are involved in fighting fur, please head over to our 4FreeBunnies CrowdJustice page.