Here's proof that just about everyone is jumping aboard the green bandwagon. In an advertising campaign launched late last year, the Fur Council of Canada touts fur-wearers as the new environmental activists. Apparently, killing small animals and turning them into tacky coats is right up there with calculating your carbon footprint.
This fuzzy thinking adds up to little more than greenwashing.
The Fur Council's "consumer reassurance" campaign-that's what it's called on their Web site-is nonsense. For starters, furs, like other animal skins, are loaded with caustic, even dangerous, chemicals to prevent them from rotting in the buyer's closet.
Before the finished product reaches the local fur salon, it is soaked in a bath of chemicals, then bleached, dyed or toned. The laundry list of chemicals used during the dressing process includes sulfuric acid, ammonium chloride, formaldehyde, lead acetate, sodium perborate and more. The alkalis, acids, chromates, bleaching agents, oils, salt and various compounds used in dyeing are potential skin irritants. In dye houses and dye kitchens, workers are also at risk of ingesting toxic dusts when salts of lead, copper and chromium, as well as possibly carcinogenic dyes, are weighed and cooked. One chemical used in dying, hexavalent chromium, is-according to the Environmental Protection Agency-a hazardous waste.
Does any of this sound eco-friendly to you?
You can add to this the fact that the majority of animals killed for fur today are raised on fur farms. Processing fur from farmed animals requires transporting feed to those animals; removing their waste; electricity for the housing and killing facilities; the use of pesticides, vaccines and antibiotics; transportation to remove the carcasses-you get the idea. In the United States alone, fur farms generate tens of thousands of tons of waste every year, including manure, shavings, straw and animal corpses. Many of those carcasses end up rotting in our landfills.
When all is said and done, producing a farmed-fur jacket requires 20 times the amount of energy needed to produce a faux fur.
Finally, any consideration of "environmentally friendly" claims must take into account the treatment of animals, since animals are a large part of the environment. Let's look at how the fur industry treats animals.
From the day they are born until the day they are killed, animals on fur farms lead lives of misery. Rabbits raised to become someone's fur collar are forced to live in their own waste in small, barren cages. Foxes, insane from stress and boredom, throw themselves repeatedly against the wire cage bars. Or they cower pitifully in the back of their cage, paralyzed with fear. The animals' deaths are painful and merciless. Many foxes are killed by being electrocuted; minks are cruelly gassed. Rabbits have their necks broken.
The fur industry's eco-friendly claims are nothing but a desperate attempt to convince the public that fur is something other than a cruel product for callous fashionistas. But by now, most of us have seen the video footage of animals being beaten, strangled or electrocuted for their pelts, and we're just not buying it.
Matt Rice is the assistant manager of campaigns for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), 501 Front St., Norfolk, VA 23510; www.FurIsDead.com.
The criticsms you are making can be rectifiedby the industry. you don't have to shut the whole industry down to do it. Many faux coats are made from fossil fuels and are not natural or eco-friendly. Wild animal pelts are self sustaining and are a part of our culture and in fact were responsible for the opening up of the North American continent hundreds of years ago. Poor practices in the industry can be cleaned up and repeat offenders closed down but the industry itself is definitely eco-friendly and always has been. All of the chemicals you discuss as being additives can be switched for much more ecologically friendly alternates. That's where your onus should be, not on destroying the way of life of indigenous peoples.
by
Archie (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 1130 comments)
on Friday, February 15, 2008 at 2:30:27 PM
Most people who wear fur coats, collars, and other trimmed items are not indigenous. And it seems to me that this article does not focus on the indigenous peoples of the world who might still be practicing ancient traditions, which include hunting and utlizing every part of the animal, including its fur. Rather, this article focuses our attention on the mega-corporations who profit from the wholesale pain, confinement, and murder of billions of animals each year, while contributing to the pollution of our planet, all for the sake of simple human vanity. There is no excuse for such barbarism, when cleaner, kinder alternatives exist.
by
Gail Davis (2 articles, 0 quicklinks, 1 diaries, 49 comments)
on Monday, February 25, 2008 at 11:13:31 AM
2 comments
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