FUR-EVER CRUEL: How animal activism and ‘faux fur’ took down one of the cruelest industries
The rapid transformation represents a shift in the perception of fur from a luxury good that signals wealth and status to an ethical faux pas. It’s perhaps the biggest animal welfare campaign success story of the 21st century, achieved by pressuring major fashion brands to drop fur from product lines. And despite the significant progress, 20.5 million animals in fur farms annually means there’s still a lot of work to be done.
KENNY TORRELLA: In just one decade, a longtime fashion mainstay has been relegated to the sidelines of both haute couture runways and bargain clothing racks: fur. In 2014, over 140 million minks, foxes, chinchillas, and raccoon dogs — a small, fox-like East Asian species — around the world were farmed and killed for their fur. By 2024, that number plummeted to 20.5 million, according to an analysis from the nonprofit Humane World for Animals using data from governments and industry…
The data encompasses the vast majority of animals raised on fur farms, though it doesn’t include the number of animals painfully ensnared in traps, which account for a small share of global fur production. It also doesn’t include fur from rabbits.
The rapid transformation represents a shift in the perception of fur from a luxury good that signals wealth and status to an ethical faux pas. It’s perhaps the biggest animal welfare campaign success story of the 21st century, achieved by pressuring major fashion brands to drop fur from product lines and persuading lawmakers across Europe and elsewhere to ban the production and even sale of fur…
The outlook for billions of animals used by humans every year, in industries from meat production to scientific research, is largely bleak. But the fall of fur shows progress is possible.
A lot of factors have contributed to the global decline in fur production, but there’s a key reason why it was possible to make progress against the industry. It produces an unnecessary luxury product that is, unlike meat, financially out of reach for most people. And that it’s so unnecessary makes its cruelty all the more horrific.
Animals farmed for fur are confined in tiny wire-bottom cages that are often stacked atop one another, causing feces and urine to fall through to the animals below them. Farms range in size from a few hundred, to a few thousand, to over 100,000 animals who are typically born in the spring and then slaughtered in the fall or winter. Mink are killed by carbon dioxide gassing, while foxes and raccoon dogs are anally electrocuted…
The conditions and practices are terrible enough, but fur farming is especially cruel considering that these are wild, non-domesticated species. In the wild, their home ranges encompass several square miles, but on fur farms, they barely have any room to move around at all, much less express natural behaviors… “They’ve literally gone insane in these operations, because they’re not fulfilling their natural behaviors,” PJ Smith, director of fashion policy at Humane World For Animals, said…
Today’s animal rights movement is largely focused on cruelty to animals raised for meat, milk, and eggs. But in the 1980s and ’90s, ending the fur industry was the cause du jour. PETA put the issue on the cultural map, stigmatizing fur by throwing fake blood on runways and recruiting A-list celebrities to wear next to nothing for its “I’d Rather Go Naked than Wear Fur” campaign…
And as major fashion brands moved away from animal fur, faux fur got a lot better. Until the mid-2000s, “faux fur was this thing that was acrylic — it looked plastic. Not many people saw it as luxury,” Smith told me. But the political and corporate progress created a “gap in the marketplace,” he said, which helped startups get funding to create better-looking, higher-quality alternatives…
That progress appears likely to continue. Switzerland just effectively banned fur imports, and the UK is considering doing the same. In 2023, European activists delivered over 1.5 million signatures in support of a ban on the production and sale of fur to the European Commission, which is currently weighing the measure.
Last week, in a major boost for the effort, the EU’s food safety agency issued a damning report on the welfare of fur-farmed animals. And earlier this month, the European Commission listed the American mink — which was brought to Europe for fur production — as an invasive species, which will restrict mink breeding and sales in the EU…
And despite the significant progress, 20.5 million animals in fur farms annually means there’s still a lot of work to be done. Smith hopes that doesn’t lead fellow animal advocates to become complacent and move on to other issues too soon, like what happened with fur in the late 1990s.
“The hardest part is going to be closing out an industry for good,” said Smith. “It’s going to be convincing those final fashion brands and retailers to move away from fur. And it’s going to be the case that we need to make to legislators and policymakers that we need to implement policy change,” he said, to “ensure the future is fur-free once and for all”. SOURCE…
RELATED VIDEO: