Pink against fur

Pink auf Polyvore

The popsinger Pink is now engaged for animal protection organization Peta and has released naked pictures of her. This way she emphasises the problem of gaining reals fur consum in our time.

Here a few facts at the beginning: 

• up to 85 percent of all fur pieces come from thousands of animals living on fur farms. 
• China is the world biggest fur exporting country and delivers more than 50 percent of the fur for the European market. But there are no animal rights in China and no controlling for fur farms. 
• Wordwide millions of rancoons, coyotes, woolves, luxes, opossums, rats, Otter and other so called fur animals are killed by traps for the fur industry. 

Fake fur auf polyvor

It doesn't matter if animals for the fur industry are bred and killed in Europe, Asia or North America, everywhere they suffer from terrible living conditions and awful killing methods. The animals are held in mass animal farms under extremely constricted cages. The most breeded animals on fur farms are minks and foxes. But even dogs and cats and also hamsters are bred for the fur trade.

Because of the suffering
in the cages many animals start to hurt and bite themselves. Even cannibalism is not uncommon. Many rabbits are also held and killed on fur farms. According to UN-data in France are more than 70 million rabbits killed every year.

The animals are beaten to death with big sticks before their fur is stripped. But many animals are then still alive and fight for their lives before they are getting stripped. They still kick and squirm and struggle. After the skin is pulled over the head, the workers throw the skinned bodies on a pile. Some of the animals are still alive at this point.

Since 2005 fur farms in Austria are forbidden, also in Great Britain. Since November 2006 fur farms are protected with regulations. But here minks are often killed with gas. Since exhaust fumes are not always lethal, a few animals are getting awake again, while being skinned. In other countries death by electroshocks are common methods to kill for fur. With this method the animals virtually burn inside and the killing takes several minutes.

Animals captured in the wilderness, are not better off than their fellow sufferer living on the farms. Barbaric steel traps are banned from the EU and also forbidden in many U.S. states. Because when an animal steps on such a trap, the prongs snatch around its leg and often embed deep into the flesh of the animal. When fighting against the trap, some animals even start to bite their leg. The fight against death can take several hours.

Every year also dogs, cats, birds and other animals are killed or mutilated by these traps. In one case, a dog named Delilah in Pennsylvania was trapped with her leg for 18 hours. Her leg had to be amputated. A study of the magazine „Textilwirtschaft“ showed, that 84% of the interviewed Germans have scruples to wear fur and would not accept their mates to wear fur. Many fur products are bought unwittingly by consumers, because they are not tagged correctly and the origin is not tagged clearly.

Also fur is getting cheaper and cheaper. And today more and more collections are designed with real fur. In the 80s and 90s fur was a no-go, but today there are again many fur bobbles on caps, hoods or shoes, key rings and  even bikinis made of fur. What happened? China floods the global market with fur and therefore real fur is even cheaper than fake fur. The suffering are the animals. In the internet there are also some documentations dealing with "fur production". 

Today it is possible to produce really great fake fur. Many retail chains don't sell fur deliberately anymore. They take part in the initiative “Fur Free Retailer Program”. Here you can search according to country or shop. For Austria alone, there are 70 Retailers. There are also some designers who don't use fur. Internationally, we know Stella McCartney as a great pioneer for vegan fashion and in Germany Guido Mario Kretschmer doesn't use fur anymore.

I hope, this trend goes again into the direction of fur free clothing, because there are good alternatives. We should always think of the big suffering of animals which is connected with it.