Other Fur Bearing Animals Impact on our Environment

Fur does not belong in the 21st century. Our ancestors wore animal skins in the stone age. They had to because there was nothing else to wear. Dog carts were an old tradition too, as was the slavery of black people and Chinese foot binding. But society progresses and adjusts its ethical standards. Even polar expeditions don’t use fur coats anymore, because there are better, less expensive, warmer and lighter alternatives available.

There is no reasonable doubt that very few British consumers would knowingly wear cat or dog fur. But as we know the fur is often disguised with phoney labelling and rarely is there a description on fur trimming or it is described as “other fur”, furs are bleached and dyed to make them resemble more expensive fur. And that process uses carcinogens such as benzene. The environmental impact is significant even in well-regulated countries such as Denmark and Finland and even more so in the generally less regulated developing world.

Under the World Bank’s industrial pollution protection system-IPPS-fur dressing and dyeing rank among the worst five industries for toxic metal pollution. Some products used in the process are banned in the European Union-for example, arsenic, which is a multiple carcinogen. In practice, furs are not biodegradable despite being natural products because the chemicals, including the carcinogens, needed to preserve the coat are not degradable and so add to the issues surrounding landfill sites when coats are discarded.

Other Fur Bearing Animals

The needless killing and suffering is unacceptable and unbearable also for the millions of other animals that are killed each year for their fur, and their pain must be realized too, the fox, mink, racoon, and more than a dozen other species reared on factory farms that cause them to go mad and mutilate themselves and each other, by the gassing, lethal injection, neck-breaking and anal electrocution, or caught in vicious leghold traps and left to starve, freeze, drown, be beaten to death or gnaw off their own limbs in a futile attempt to escape. This is the reality of the fur trade – they do not care about the suffering of innocent animals. They do not care about the impact their industry has on our environment. Those in the fur trade have no conscience they are governed by greed and selfishness, all they care about is money. Fur should be where it really does belong – history!

The use of cheap real fur is commonly used in fur trim: people need to be wary. A coat with a fur-trim collar or hood is much more likely to be genuine fur than fake.

And that stuffed toy cat or dog might well be made out of real dog or cat fur, sales people in their ignorance often simply claim it must be fake if its cheap. Avoiding the purchase of any fur items is the best precaution.

Here are a few simple steps that consumers may take to distinguish between real and fake fur, according to Animal World Net:

			REAL	FAKE
1	Feel	Feel the difference by rolling the hairs between finger and thumb…	Feels smooth and soft, easily rolls between the finger.	Feels coarse.
2	LOOK	collars of longhaired fur – blow on the hairs so they divide…	Often made up of several layers of thin, almost curly hairs which form a dense under-wool, through which the longer hairs stick out. The base is leather.	Simpler in structure, individual hairs are often the same length and even in colour.
3	PINCH WITH A PIN	through the base…	The leather resists, pin is hard to push through.	Pin easily goes through the base.
4	BURN TEST	(pull, very carefully) a few hairs from the fur and hold them to a flame…	Singes like a human hair and smells similar.	Melts like plastic and smells like burnt plastic. Forms small plastics balls at the ends that feel hard between finger and thumb