Whether the animals are from a "ranch" or "farm", or trapped in the wild, using and killing animals for fur causes tremendous and completely unnecessary suffering.
"Farmed" or "Ranched" Fur
Animals raised to become someone’s fur coat spend their days exposed to the elements in row after row of barren, tiny, urine- and feces-encrusted cages. Investigations have found animals with gruesome injuries going without medical care and foxes and minks pacing in endless circles, crazy from the confinement.
Minks, foxes, chinchillas, raccoons, and other animals on fur farms spend their entire lives confined to tiny, filthy cages, constantly circling and pacing back and forth from stress and boredom, some animals even self-mutilating or cannibalizing cagemates. Foxes are kept in cages measuring only 2.5 feet square, with one to four animals per cage. Minks and other species are generally kept in cages only 1 foot by 3 feet, again with up to four animals per cage. The cramped and overcrowded conditions are especially distressing to solitary animals, like minks.
During the summer, hundreds of thousands of animals endure searing heat and suffer from dizziness and vomiting before dying of heat exhaustion. Baby animals are the most common victims, as they succumb faster to dehydration. In the winter, caged animals have nowhere to seek refuge from freezing temperatures, rain, sleet, and snow.
No federal law protects animals on fur farms. Farmers often kill animals by anal or genital electrocution, which causes them to experience the intense pain of a heart attack while fully conscious. Other killing methods include neck-breaking and suffocation. Sometimes animals are only stunned and are then skinned alive.
There have been numerous undercover investigation done to document the cruelty on fur farms firsthand. Contact us find out more about, or to get details on how to obtain a copy of these tapes.
Suffering in the Wild
Animals like raccoons and foxes caught in steel-jaw leghold traps—the most widely used trap—endure excruciating pain from the steel bars clamped onto their legs, paws, and bodies. Some animals, especially mothers desperate to return to their young, will struggle to get loose, even chewing or twisting off their own legs to escape. Animals suffer for hours or even days in traps before trappers arrive to stomp on their chests or break their necks. The trapped animal is left to suffer blood loss, infection, gangrene, exhaustion, exposure, frostbite, shock, or attack by nonhuman predators. Other animals, such as beavers and muskrats, caught in underwater traps can struggle for up to 20 minutes before drowning. Every year, traps also cripple and kill hundreds of thousands of dogs, cats, birds, and other animals—including endangered species—who are caught by mistake.
But What About Indiginous People's Reliance on The Fur Industry?
"The fur trade is the most insidious source of prejudice against native peoples. The Fur Institute of Canada and the government drag token Indians all over Europe to get support for the white fashion and fur industry as if natives were some sort of noble gods. In contrast, back at home, they cut education programs that could get natives out of subsistence jobs like fur trapping."
Paul Hollingsworth, founder of Native/Animal Brotherhood
After a decade of lackluster sales and plummeting profits, the fur industry is shamelessly attempting to justify its bloody trade by claiming to care about indigenous people.
The fur wars of the 1970s and 1980s permanently linked fur, in the minds of consumers, with the barbaric cruelty of steel-jawed traps and the hideous cramped confinement of cage-raised furbearers. With increasing numbers of compassionate people turning their backs on cruelty, the fur industry now alleges to support the traditional trapping lifestyle of aboriginal people. While some indigenous cultures have trapped animals for sustenance, killing animals for the sake of fashion and vanity is irreconcilable with indigenous philosophies of respect for the land and the animals.
The Native/Animal Brotherhood notes that the fur industry is anti-traditional and that the fur industry was a primary force behind the historical subjugation of native peoples. Paul Hollingsworth, founder of the Native/Animal Brotherhood states: "For 300 years the native people have been tools of the fur trade. The fur trade took our land, our culture, and our animal brothers. Once we were one with Mother Earth and all her creatures. It's time we listened to the animals' voices instead of trading in their blood.”
According to Statistics Canada, only 3% of all fur available for sale in North America comes from native trapping. Making an average of $225 per year from the sale of animal skins, aboriginal trappers are paid a pittance for doing the dirty, exhausting, bloody work of an industry that cares nothing about the indigenous people and even less about the animals. While the fur industry claims that aboriginal survival depends on trapping and the sale of fur, clearly, the continuation of trapping as the sole source of income will keep aboriginal people below even subsistence-level incomes.
