This
is as delivered December 1999. Watch out for end notes (encoded in the body
of the Word text); and for the references;
and for the appendices
Fur
and Freedom: a defence of the fur trade
By
Chapter
One The fur trade: cruel and unnecessary?
Chapter
Three: The Authorities
During
the past year I have been funded by the British Fur Trade Association to pursue
an information project. The funding equated to about three months' working
time. The idea originated with me and the agenda was determined far more by me
than by the trade. I am grateful to the association for the open-minded
attitude its members brought to a project whose main characteristic was that I
made up my own mind what I thought and said. I have been honoured to ally
myself with the trade and aim to continue to speak my mind about it.
This pamphlet, whose writing was
funded by the IEA, is part of the fruit of the BFTA research funding. This past
year or so I have worked quite closely on various projects with Roger Bate and
Julian Morris of the IEA and feel great admiration for the dynamism, rigour and
enterprise they bring to promoting serious, often counter-intuitive, thinking
about "green" issues, which are so often riddled with political
correctness and humbug.
Many academics and others have been
generous with their time. I hope I have understood and transmitted their
insights and evidence.
It
has been a surprisingly good year for the British fur trade, and it is one that
has ended a surprisingly good decade for this most disparaged of businesses.
It's true that some of the most
obvious signs were and remain the reverse of cheerful. In November, the
monarch, wearing a stunning designer fur coat, arrived in Parliament to deliver
the Queen's speech in which she announced her Government's determination to
introduce legislation banning fur farming.
If enacted, the bill will deliver a New Labour manifesto commitment
which had earlier in the year had backbench championing. In January 1999, Maria
Eagle, the Labour MP, introduced her private member's bill which sought to ban
the farming of fur in
Extraordinarily, Elliot Morley, the
Countryside Minister, now uses the grounds of "public morality" to
defend the proposed ban. This language is new, and seems necessary mostly
because there are few serious justifications for picking out fur farming as
particularly bad except perhaps that large numbers of people profess themselves
opposed to it. In other words, public "morality" is now synonymous
with public "opinion". We will be looking at the some of the obvious
differences between the two. Anyway, ministers have elevated public opinion,
however ill-informed, inflamed by media outpourings or transient, into what
passes in a febrile age for ethical principle.
On the face of it, the prospect of a ban is bad news for the
trade and good news for animals. In reality, as we shall see, it is neither. A
ban would, however, surely be bad news for freedom, for good sense, and for
fair play.
Indeed, very interesting aspects
of the way modern societies work and think are on display as we watch events
surrounding the fur trade. Such study is a wonderful opportunity to watch
double-think, moral triviality, grandstanding and humbug at work on issues
ranging from animal welfare through to thinking about the rich.
Maria Eagle's bill produced one
major effect she may not have desired: the second sustained media discussion
which allowed the possibility that a ban of fur farming might be an oppressive
use of the law (the first followed the release of mink from farms in August and
September 1998, see below).
There are of course profound animal welfare issues in the
use of fur, as there are in any other animal use. Few consumers of bacon
sandwiches would consider their activity to be as morally problematic as
wearing fur, and yet there are close parallels between them. A discussion of
these issues will make up the second, animal welfare, part of what follows, as
Chapter Two.
But we
begin with the human side of the issue, in Chapter One. The fur trade has long
been subject to pressure from its opponents, who protest in various ways. Some
assert, and respect, the right to protest in a more or less dignified and very
public way. Some protesters noisily harangue the customers and staff of fur
shops, whilst others go so far as to harass them. Others take the battle to the
homes of anyone associated with the fur trade, and there the harassment takes
on a new seriousness.
Much of this sort of protest looks like the entirely
laudable if uncomfortable process of a vigorous democracy. Some of it is
exactly that, and attracts a good deal of tacit public support. We need,
though, to look at the issue in a rather more sceptical way than is common, and
an attempt to do so will make up the section on public opinion and protest that
follows.
Some protesters undertake direct action against fur farms,
most famously in the summer of 1998 when they released mink into the wild.
Because the releases brought about the first positive press coverage the fur
trade had received for years, we will look at these in this chapter as we widen
discussion to cover the media.
This is where we will also look at the remarkable revival of
the fortunes of the fur trade in recent years. Long castigated as a "dying
trade" by its enemies, it is actually flourishing.[3] It is
clearly a "luxury" trade, and as such is a bell-whether of the
world's economy, and especially of the emerging economies which provide large
quantities of nouveaux riches seeking
extravagant expression of their new found wealth. The trade's opponents seem to
dislike it precisely because it thrives when the rich thrive, and they suppose
that it only satisfies desires which only the rich can indulge. We will look at
this latter premise and prejudice and discover it be flawed. This will be the
right moment to defend extravagance for its own sake.
Public attitudes are
not quite what the protesters might hope, and even the media is getting around
to producing better coverage of the fur trade. But even if it cannot hope that
protest will go away or even much diminish, the fur trade is within its rights
to hope that it will be offered a decent level of protection from the hard core
activists, first of all in law and then in the courts and on the ground. This
area, policing freedom, is full of dilemmas. Since the courts and police
operate only under licence from parliament, this is where we come full circle,
in Chapter Three, where we discuss how governments and the authorities respond
to these issues, and how they ought to. What is the politicians' obligation to
the protesters, customers and traders, and the animals, we will by then have
discussed in some detail?
Chapter One The
fur trade: cruel and unnecessary?
Anyone
associated with the fur trade knows that they are in a business which it is
hardly polite to mention. The response of the majority of people on meeting a
furrier is often a sort of shock that they have actually come across such a
pariah. Many people are used to hearing or even mouthing opposition to the
trade, and to hearing or mouthing vague support for all the famous and
attractive people who declare themselves its enemies. Actually to meet the
object of all this dislike is a little surprising.
But
something else happens too. People go on to say they don't approve of violent
protest, and - almost by the way - women often add what fun it was when one
could wear one's furs, and are such times really dead and gone?
It
is, by the way, not merely the elderly or rich who now remember wearing fur:
there is a generation of middle aged women of all sorts who wore fur in the 60s
and 70s, often buying it in junk or charity shops, or inheriting from
grandmothers and mothers.
Still, it is often a surprise for people to
meet someone working in or supporting the trade. It is as though one had said
one was an undertaker, or a slaughterhouse worker, even a paedophile. It would
be better to say that one was a burglar than to admit to being a furrier. Now
obviously these are all different cases. An undertaker gives people the creeps,
though we know the job is respectable. A slaughterhouse worker is somehow more
shocking, as though only a callous person could do such work, though such
workers are thought to be somehow blamelessly manual. A paedophile would be
disdained as a pervert as well as a criminal, but at least has the merit of
being ill. A burglar might even be thought to have a certain glamour: think how
celebrities courted the gang bosses of the Sixties.
So how to get the heart of the
special dislike of the fur trade? The best image is that of Cruella Deville,
the witchlike bitch queen in Walt Disney's 101 Dalmations. She has a monstrous
love of glamour, and a mighty disdain for the suffering she causes as she
achieves it. She is, after all, the Devil. She has the same element of the
joyously diabolical as we find in the Absolutely Fabulous females: we know they
are atrocious, but we hope they win over more boringly scrupulous types.
Cruella has the best lines in her movie, too.
There is assumed to be an element of torture in the fur
trade, Cruella's own, of course, which is not present in most other uses of
animals. The same sort of hatred does attach, however, to vivisectionists, as
people who use animals in any way in experiments are still called, though few
actually cut into their animals, or indeed inflict serious pain. They are
somehow assumed to be heartless men in pursuit of heartless science, or
validation - more trivially - of unnecessary cosmetics.
But the Cruella image might seem well applied to furriers
because their trade is perceived to deal to an extraordinary degree in waste
and luxury. Maria Eagle caught this sense exactly in her bill which sought to
ban fur farming. It emphasised the cruelty of the production methods on the one
hand, but it pointedly juxtaposed the extravagance of the final product on the
other. It aimed, she told the House of Commons on the first day of debate on her
Fur Farming (Prohibition) Bill to outlaw "the cruel exploitation of
essentially wild animals for what is an inessential luxury item."
[Telegraph, 1999b] This interlocking of elements was felt to be a killer blow:
one might justify suffering which was caused by necessity and one might justify
luxury which did not involve suffering. But causing suffering just for luxury
was clearly doubly wrong. It was also a situation unique to the fur trade, and
expressed the uniqueness of the wrong done by the trade.
The
same simplicity could not be applied, for instance, to vivisection, which comes
bundled with different degrees of usefulness, and indeed is now more or less
outlawed for cosmetic purposes.
Now to unpick some of this. It is
clearly the case that people are within their rights to believe that man's use
of animals is not justified by any human purpose. The animal rights case, in
most of its forms, depends crucially on reminding ourselves that in the wild,
"nature" has ordained what happens to animals, and however awful that
may be, at least humans may say that it is no fault of theirs. Provided humans
stand back from nature, none of the suffering of animals is a moral charge on
people.
The more "hard-line" an
animal rights case is being made, the less the usefulness or extravagance of
the outcome matters. A hard-line animal rights view no more attacks useful
animal experimentation than trivial experimentation. The human outcome is not
in issue: the animal impact is. From a strict animal rightist point of view, it
should make no difference the purpose for which an animal died. Such a view
dislikes the way high human purposes might be put into the balance against
animal suffering. The animal's supposed right is to non-interference, not
merely to have its interests weighed in the balance.
Most
of the serious (and dangerous) protesters against the fur trade are Vegan. That
is: they believe no animal consumption by humans can be justified. The
"hard" Vegan case does not discriminate between food for the hungry,
say, or pigs killed for bacon sandwiches for the overweight. It just says man
shouldn't kill animals for food.
There is of course ordinary merit in views much less extreme
than this. Many of us distinguish between the human benefit derived from
different forms of animal suffering. If there came to be a choice between using
animals in research and using them in coats, most of us would prefer to defend
the former, even if the former caused more suffering.
Whether one is against vivisection or merely against eating
animals, such positions are capable of logical defence, have emotional appeal
and may even be sensible.
The
right to hold this sort of opinion is not in question. Arguably, it is the most
noble sort of opinion about animals a person can hold. But many arguments which
sought to defend the interests of animals would not by themselves stigmatise
the fur-trade any more than they stigmatised the keeping of pigs for bacon, of
cows for milk, the hunting of fox for fun and conservation, or the hunting of deer,
or any other use.
The harder the animal rights case a person puts, the less
can that person sensibly stigmatise the fur trade for the luxury of the
outcome. Most animal production is undertaken for human pleasure, not human
need. It makes no more sense to shout at a furrier than to shout at a butcher.
It's just easier, and easier to get away with it in a society which doesn't
care to think about such things. This is not the place to argue the legitimacy
of man’s treatment of animals. [Scruton, 1996] It is only necessary here to
argue that the fur trade has no harder a case to argue than any other trade
using animal products.
Maria
Eagle's bill argued that in the special case of fur, the suffering of animals
is compounded by the lack of need for the products which result. This argument
appeals to people who attempt to discriminate between the purposes for which
animals suffer and die. It shouldn't make much difference to the hard-liners
who most cared for Ms Eagle's bill, and is in any case deeply flawed in the
case of fur.
To
stigmatise the fur trade efficiently, one would ideally need to demonstrate
that it caused more suffering to animals than the other practices one
stigmatised less, or prove that it was so egregiously, exceptionally,
grievously extravagant that though it caused little suffering it could not be
condoned.
Chapter
Two will deal with the issue of animal suffering and suggests that it is
surprisingly small in the case of producing fur. One might bend over backwards
and concede for the purposes of argument that mink and pig are on a par when it
comes to the degree of their suffering or otherwise on farms. But what is as
interesting is that it is the very arguments of vegetarianism and Veganism
which help us see that the fur trade is really no more unnecessary than is the
production of meat, milk or any other animal product. Marie Eagle's
"luxury" argument limps even more dramatically than does her
"welfare" argument.
It
is demonstrably true that western man has no need of animal produce. We can eat
a Vegan diet without suffering. Indeed if the world fed less of its plant
material to animals for human consumption, it would theoretically better
support a large human population. [Leach, 1976] There is even a case to be made
that Westerners not only do not need to eat animal produce, but that they need
to eat less of it. This is to say that over-consumption of animal produce
shortens or worsens our lives. So one might say that a good deal of whatever
suffering is involved in animal farming is not merely not useful to man, but
produces human as well as animal suffering.
Maria
Eagle's bill invoked a calculus of animal suffering versus human benefit, and
supposed quite wrongly that it caught fur squarely in its net. Actually, her
calculus would exonerate fur but trap the bacon sandwich or the pint of milk
far more effectively. Or rather, it would trap the third bacon sandwich of the
week, and the second ice cream. It would certainly trap the bulk of food animal
production, even if it only slightly dented the principle of it.
There
is no need to accept the argument about luxury in the terms which a
left-leaning politician such as Maria Eagle, in common with most of the animal
rights protesters, sees it. True, fur has since the beginning of history been a
symbol of affluence and display. From the medieval period until now, it was
incorporated in ceremonial and official dress for that reason. Ermine,
especially, has always been associated with authority. These habits and ideas
probably flowed from the costliness of fabrics which were efficiently warm, but
which above all had the same sort of exotic rarity value that attached to
spices. They came, similarly, from far afield. They came through the
entrepreneurship and courage of traders.
Fur
has been fashionable in various periods ever since, perhaps especially in the
last decades of the nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth
century. It is hard at this distance to know what people thought then about the
animals which had been killed to create the clothes they longed for. In the
first decades of this century, far more fur came from trapped animals than was
farmed. Farmed fur wasn’t common until the 1930's. Whether people were just
less interested in animal welfare then is hard to say. Certainly, the fate of
an animal depended on its owner, since animals were conceived of as a person's
property, and his rights over his property were sacred. [Brown, 1974] They were
less squeamish times, but arguably not much less caring or gentle for all that.
[Thomas, 1984] Human relations, too, were conducted with less superficial
display of compassion, but arguably with just as great real or effective
concern.
After
the Second World War, furs remained the prerogative of old money, but they became in the 1950s, as
they had been in the 30s, a piece of display desired by the new rich of show
business and industry. This changed as protest began to make fur-wearing in the
It
must have seemed then to the protesters that the entire social scene had
changed and moved in their favour. By the early 80s, Greenpeace was able to
commission David Bailey to make the notorious cinema advertisement, with the
slogan about many dumb animals giving up their lives to clothe just one dumb
human animal. Many in the fashion and entertainment industries - models and
ex-models amongst them - signed up to help make fur-wearing a despised habit.
In 1995 Naomi Campbell famously aligned herself with the PETA (People for the
Ethical Treatment of Animals) poster campaign in which naked models were
photographed with the caption: "We'd rather go naked than wear fur".
Apparently untroubled by her inconsistency, in 1997 and again in 1999 she was
starring in catwalk shows featuring fur. [Guardian, 1997; The Express, 1999]
Curiously,
and unexpectedly, the protest, mostly based in
About
60 percent of the world trade in fur skins, but nothing like that proportion of
the manufacture or retailing of fur garments, is conducted in
Now, however, there is hardly any
garment manufacture in the
It follows from all these factors
that little might change if fur could no longer be farmed in the
It is also useful to note that the
Fur, mostly from overseas, is traded through
It
might not matter to the protesters, but the majority of
The fur trade has occasionally
justified its existence by stressing that fur is an ecologically sound means of
keeping warm, and have hoped by this argument to suggest that fur answers basic
human needs. This reasoning is sound so far as it goes, but it doesn't quite go
far enough.
There are all sorts of ways of
keeping warm, but the one we should really celebrate is the one which satisfies
one of the greatest of human urges: the urge to extravagance. The dislike of
luxury which lies behind much anti-fur protest ignores the fact that luxury is
vital to human society, and that this form of extravagance comes without the
ecological disadvantage which attaches to, say, the ownership and use of large
cars or speedboats, or even to foreign travel by jet plane.
There
is a powerful case to be made for the idea that the need for luxury is one of
the most fundamental human urges, as it is one of the most powerful
well-springs of activity in the whole animal kingdom. Biologists have long
understood a Darwinian explanation for the apparent excesses of display which,
say, the peacock indulges in. Sexual attractiveness which involves a
conspicuous and costly display demonstrates a male's ability to satisfy to an
extraordinary degree the capacity to fulfil his basic needs.
Jared
Diamond, Professor of Physiology at the University of California, Los Angeles
and a leading evolutionary biologist, cites the views of various biologists to
the effect that conspicuous display is useful to animals perhaps because their
capacity to survive whilst throwing huge resources at display promises genetic
success [Diamond, 1997]
But what about people, with their subtler and more
powerful minds? Professor Diamond supposes that our attitude to adornment and
display may always have had something in common with the adaptive behaviour of
animals.
He
compares and contrasts a stag's antlers with a piece of human display common in
the West:
[a
stag's antlers represent an] investment of calcium, phosphate, and calories,
yet they are grown and discarded each year. Only the most well-nourished males
- ones that are mature, socially dominant, and free of parasites - can afford
that investment. Hence a female deer can regard big antlers as an honest ad for
male quality, just as a woman whose boyfriend buys and discards a Porsche
sports car each year can believe his claim of being wealthy. But antlers carry
a second message not shared with Porsches. Whereas a Porsche does not generate
more wealth, big antlers do bring their owner access to the best pastures by
enabling him to defeat rival males and fight off predators.
Actually,
the Porsche does bear at least a passing relationship to utility. Throughout
history, men have needed to be swift. Even in historically recent times they
have needed to be well-mounted. The quality and expense of a man's horse was a
sign to himself and others he sought to impress that he had glamorous and
extravagant as well as efficient means of locomotion. The horse's modern
replacement and surrogate is the sports car. True, for most forms of getting
about, a Porsche is not a highly functional piece of equipment, but it can
function as a necessary car for most purposes, more or less.
In
any case, redundancy is also important, in human affairs as in nature, as
Professor Diamond reminds us:
While
any man can boast to a woman that he is rich and therefore she should go to bed
with him in the hopes of enticing him into marriage, he might be lying. Only
when she sees him throwing away money on useless expensive jewellery and sports
cars can she believe him.
This
sort of argument have been retailed elegantly by Geoffrey Miller, who cites the
Israeli biologist Amotz Zahavi's "The Handicap Principle" to the
effect that "there is a necessary tension between natural selection (for
survival) and sexual selection (for attracting mates), and waste is at the
heart of that tension…. The Handicap
Principle suggests that prodigious waste is a necessary feature of sexual
courtship." Humans, like animals, expend energy and wealth in evidencing
their attractiveness as gene-stock. They do so as part of their instinctual
make-up. They flourish when they can display well, and suffer when they cannot.
[Miller, 1999]
Modern consumer
society operates on the principle that conspicuous consumption may pose moral
dilemmas, of course it does, but that it is one important engine of human
happiness and well-being.
That is why few of us condemn the quest for glamour. Fur is
not merely an extravagant item of display, it is an overtly sexual one. This is
the essence of glamour: it is where power, money and sexuality meet. Glamour
can't really be polite, understated, modest. It has some difficulty hanging on
to being merely decent. Liz Hurley characterises modern British glamour: she
wears expensive clothes and diamonds and is perhaps beautiful. But she is in
the image of Diana Dors, say, in outrageous and overt sexual immodesty.
Glamour cannot really operate in private. Though the
ownership, say, of Fendi furs or Ferraris, is essentially an egotistical
matter, it is only a very eccentric person who enjoys these goods in private.
Their public display is crucial to their enjoyment.
The interesting thing about this element of
public display of these sorts of goods is that to a surprising degree, the rest
of us get a free ride from their ownership by others. Our magazines and
television are enlivened, let alone largely paid for, by the blandishments of
advertisers enticing the rich; the fashion and society pages and gossip columns
all shower us with examples of the luxury and attractiveness of the rich and
their spending. We can ogle the images of what we cannot afford. If we have the
good sense to keep envy and jealousy in their place, we can enjoy the fantasy
without too much resentment.
There
is a strand of Christian thinking which disparages this sort of display, and
the vicarious pleasure we may take in it, as worldly, unspiritual, egotistical,
and which instead celebrates abstemiousness as being in the tradition of
asceticism of the founding fathers of the faith. This tendency has underpinned
socialism from its medieval beginnings, and it now permeates green thinking,
which prides itself on reducing man's impact on nature and countering
materialism.
Whatever the apparent value of the
pedigree of worries about materialism, it has several difficulties. One is that
it does not allow for the facts of human nature. But another is that it is hard
to decouple the great moral value of the free economy and the free society from
their roots in individualism, and that by definition is not amenable to
discipline.
Capitalism is the business of harnessing the aspirations to
affluence, display and glamour as basic energising forces for the entire
economy. Capitalism has the merit of encouraging and rewarding the accumulation
of wealth, and of channelling the energies of powerful people into acquiring
and displaying wealth whilst creating opportunities and affluence all around
them. It rewards risk-taking with wealth, and freely celebrates the channelling
of wealth into waste and glamour [North, 1999]. So far as we know, societies
which stifle these opportunities for very long develop covert consumption and status-seeking
by elites which are either criminal or state-sponsored.
So we need to see the social merit
of conspicuous consumption by individuals. It satisfies those who are
successfully ambitious and spurs on those who are merely ambitious, while it diverts
society at large.
One could go so far as to say that
one of the great merits of the fur trade is that it precisely is a luxury
trade, satisfying not the boringly basic human needs, but far more interesting
and vital ones. In an important way, wants are needs. A society which cannot
give people what they want, will pall. It will pall in interest and vibrancy,
but it will also soon more seriously fail to attract or keep some of the most
useful of its citizens. A society that cannot entice the few cannot sustain the
many.
These arguments should not be
contentious in an age which has rejected socialism. They remain so because
populism dictates a slight anxiety about anything which might be called
elitism.
Bien pensant opinion mostly affects to despise the matter of getting
rich, though liberal-minded writers and artists, or liberal lawyers, are no
less dedicated to getting wealth than their right-wing counterparts. Still, the
aesthetic of the intelligentsia tends toward understated means of expressing their
financial well-being, and eschews the flashily vulgar expenditure of those who
are inventing new ways of making money.
Wearing furs now hovers between two
interesting extremes, rather as does the ownership of Rolls Royces. It is the
preserve alike of those with old money who are damned if they should give up
old ways of displaying it, and of those with new money who are not yet abashed
about vulgar display.
It would be a bleak prospect for
stylish
Oddly, though, after years in which it seemed that the
opinion-formers in the fashion world were going along with the protesters, and
adopting a certain protest chic (think of designer houses like Red Or Dead or
Katherine Hamnett), there is now strong evidence that old-fashioned glamour,
and fur in particular, have proved capable of attracting a new generation of
designers and customers.
Luxury for its own sake is in
fashion, even after being discredited by the downfall of the yuppies and the
Trumps (briefly), and after satirical successes such as the Bonfire Of the
Vanities. Now we see the downmarket film, Diamonds Are Forever, being
celebrated by the diamond industry (formerly a South African pariah), and by a
galaxy of minor stars in borrowed diamonds, all given the blessing of Prince
Charles sporting a Versace handkerchief
in his breast pocket.
Fur in particular has flourished
because the idea of glamour has certain constants. But fur also has newer
connotations which have found their way into fashion.
The modern mind is not easy to
chart. But one thing seems especially to characterise it. It dislikes rules.
Many of the customers for fur retailers are now young women who have made their
own way and their own money, and if they want sports cars and furs, that's
exactly what they'll have. They do not need the say-so of socialist or green or
animal rights people to tell them whether such expenditure is acceptable. They
are not interested in liberal opinion. This generation of young women will
indulge its instincts with scant respect for respectability, or, at the
extreme, even the law.
One strand of these instincts is
rather similar to the strand of "dangerous" Romanticism which the Age
of Reason, the Enlightenment, spawned in
It
is interesting that many modern artists are addressing the issue of man's
relations with his own body, dead or alive, and with animals. The latter are
not seen from a bunny-hugging, animal rights point of view. Much of the work of
people like Damien Hirst is a meditation on animals and our feelings about them
which has anything but an animal rights perspective. After all, Damien Hirst
himself is a co-proprietor of restaurants which sell animal produce at high
prices. Charles Saatchi, patron of modern art and, according to one paper,
"the creator of New Neurotic Realism", plans to turn his controversial
Royal Academy of Arts show, Sensation, into a theme for a string of restaurants
in which, "diners can expect to sit amongst…. A shark in formaldehyde by
Hirst…" [Sunday Telegraph, 1999c]
Fur takes its place in this new aesthetic. Its appeal is an
atavistic one. In wearing fur one is in the tradition of one's earliest hunting
forebears, and of one's medieval ancestors. The new catwalk style of fur is not
soignee, it is savage. Its most
distinctive feature is to use fur as though the wearer were a neanderthal
tribes woman, and the fur itself is made to seem as though it were hot from the
animal's back. This actually belies the way that it is modern, highly
technical, treatment of fur which allows such freedom of use. [Daily Telegraph,
1999]
There is no contradiction, and nothing new, in this
deliberate anachronism and atavism. Styles in food, furniture and fashion are
aways driven forward as much by admiration for the peasant and the primitive as
for the sophisticated. Like much which is truly stylish, fur demonstrates how
the primitive and the sophisticated are in close proximity. The revival of fur
in the fashion trade comes about as part of an interest in the primitive, even
the warrior and certainly the hunting heritage. Without thinking it through,
designers are drifting toward the Romantic, the gothic and the medieval for
inspiration, and fur finds its place in that aesthetic as attractive, but
dangerous too.
The
whole world of the arts is now, as it has always been, infected by an urge
which seeks to break down barriers of any sort. As soon as we think we have
understood what certain people will think and feel, we find that a dynamic
society overturns the cliché.
We might, for instance, note that the
Institute of Contemporary Art is now headed by Ivan Massow, a
commercially-successful homosexual master of fox hounds. [Telegraph, 1999a]
This is a confluence of four attributes and activities (art, entrepreneurship,
overt homosexuality, hunting) which even a decade ago would be unlikely to
co-habit. It is of a piece with an almost anarchic melt-down of old patterns of
thought, of old ideas of decency.
Designers and their customers are not making political
statements when using fur. Nonetheless in the present climate it takes a
certain courage to buy and wear fur. Fur-wearing takes its place with other new
patterns in fashion because it is challenging, and defiant. It is dissident,
but not in the old way: it is not cocking a snook at the old Establishment (as
dissidence used to seek to do). It is cocking a snook against the newly
established political correctness of the left and of the greens. Aristocrats,
country people, parvenus, artists and designers can ally on that, if on little
else. Like any true social change, it is not just a matter of poses, but of
muddles of attributes rearranging themselves in people's minds. It is much more
a question of what people are allowing themselves to say or do than of any deep
change in what they actually are. It is not a change in what people want, but
in what they admit to, allow or expect.
It is no use applying ordinary
standards of moral seriousness to fashion, any more than it is useful to apply
them to art. The most serious artist, like the fashion designer, will always be
tempted to test a prohibition, rather as he or she will always test an
inhibition, to see if this is an area in which a shock and a surprise can be
delivered. People do not ask permission from moralists before finding something
compelling. When people want to take risks, live dangerously, or explore this
or that aspect of taste, they do so often in defiance of respectable,
intelligent or compassionate opinion. This is not to say that wearing fur is
irrational or hard-hearted: it is merely to say that a charge of irrationality
or even cruelty might not deter people from wanting to do it. And so fur,
because of who dislikes it, is bound to attract new friends. Socially, nothing
attracts like opposition.
Without permission from respectable
opinion, and in defiance of what might have been thought to be settled
objections, and quite contrary to expectation, designers and customers are
swinging toward increasing use of fur. The catwalks are full of it, though
usually in the form of trims and accessories. Young designers are spearheading
the most avant-garde explorations of this new vogue. Models (most notably Naomi
Campbell) who previously, and probably thoughtlessly, had opined that fur was
unspeakably cruel, now seem happy to wear it.
But it would be a mistake to see the
switch to fur as a political statement in itself. The Economist has noted the
recent flurry of interest in fur and concluded that the return to fur is not
self-consciously political. "For the last word, however, it makes sense to
go to the designers, and they have a rather less complicated take on the
subject. According to Jean-Paul Gaultier, 'It's not about politics, it's about
quality. If you want the softness and lightness and warmth of skin, you use
skin. Nothing feels like sable. If you want that feeling, you use that' …..
There was a lot of fur in the autumn/winter couture shows because the
couturiers had suddenly remembered that in autumn/winter, in the northern
hemisphere, fur is, well - nice." [Economist, 1999] What is more, the
tendency toward the outrageous and the animal is not being driven by cynical
and case-hardened older gurus and trend-setters. Rather, the old guard makes
regular pilgrimages to the graduation shows of places such as St Martin's
college of fashion in London, whose alumni are reported to be driven much more
by a quest for freshness, feel and theatricality than they are by any
self-consciously serious ideas. [Evening Standard, 1999]
This is not a case of Reactionary Chic, the successor to
Radical Chic.
Those who once opposed fur have not
necessarily rethought the issue. The support for fur of some of the people who
now work in or model it is not necessarily comforting to the trade merely
because they once opposed the trade. There is no sign that many of them did
much thinking when they condemned fur, and their reinstatement of it does not
seem either to have flowed from fresh study or research. They do not seem so
much to have changed their mind as merely their behaviour. They have not so
much adapted their moral thinking as reconsidered what is fashionable.
This shades into the political only
when one remembers that there is a strong modern imperative to the permissive.
There is a spirit of aggressive pluralism in the air. This is very testing to
those whose business is pressing for bans, and it is hardly less so for those
who press for a courteous understanding of other people's sensitivity. In all
sorts of respects, we seem to be seeing a reaction to the "ban"
culture, as we do to the "blame" culture. It is not merely the right
which dislikes both: in the permissive and libertarian LM magazine, the left
too has discovered the joys of choice.
At its least attractive this is manifest in people's
impatience with any restriction on their behaviour, as when, for instance,
jet-skiers speed dangerously and noisily close to swimmers, or youngsters allow
their stereos to "leak" into the hearing of everyone else sharing a
railway carriage with them. It is quite funny, when it is seen as young people
defiantly smoking in the street, and less so when they do it in the Tube. When
the outrageous behaviour is risky or costly only to the perpetrator, we surely
ought to reach over backwards to condone it.
But what happens when desires compete noisily or
dangerously? What are we to say when we are up against what Ivan Illich called
the "radical monopoly": for instance, when someone seeking quiet is
afflicted with the tyranny, as he sees it, of noise? What are we to say when a
young man's enterprise brings him to busk in our train, and pits his love of his own voice against our expectation of a
normal silence? Or when he shoves the Big Issue in your face, or she her baby?
Or when an overweight middle aged man arrives in the supermarket wearing a
sleeveless vest? Or, to come to our issue, what to make about the woman in fur
who stands between two Vegans in the supermarket queue? These are all forms of
social pollution, so far as those who do not like them are concerned. How to
unpick these problems?
We cannot give in to a tyranny of
the sensitive. A man has the right to smell of beer on the tube; we cannot stop
people wearing shell-suits. We cannot make public places subject themselves to
a fascism of orderliness. Few Vegans are so sensitive that they could not eat a
veggie-burger in a McDonald's, where others celebrate the muscle of beef, the
breast and leg of chicken. Surely, people have a right to wear fur in public
and still be the subject of the more normal rules of politeness.
However, it is no use to say that
the wearing of fur is no-one's business but the furrier's and their customers.
There is a moral dimension to fur wearing, whatever the indifference of many
fur-designers or fur-wearers to the lives and deaths of fur-bearers. It is
entirely possible that a strong body of modern opinion may support people's
right to take pleasure in animals any way they like. This would not make such
use or consumption right. It might even make it all the more important that
people who were interested in animals take all the more interest.
The problem is not unique to fur by
any means. We have seen in many areas of intensive husbandry that many
consumers simply buy on price, and it has really fallen to a minority to
consider the animals' welfare or indeed to consider the animal at all. As
Stephen Budiansky notes in The Covenant of the Wild, modern society seems
schizophrenically composed of people who treat animals as humans and those who
treat them as things. The latter part of this case might well be the case with
some fur-wearers. [Budiansky, 1994]
It might seem odd that people who
wear fur are not often interested in how the animal who contributed to the
product came to do so. One might think that consumers for fur would like to
know whether it was trapped in the high arctic, or farmed in Scandinavia. But
that's how it is, and the matter is much the same with people eating bacon or
beef.
People have the right to wear fur
without thinking about animals at all, if that's what they want to do. There is
no form of human consumption of legal goods and services which requires that
one consider the wider dimensions of what one does. The Rolls Royce owner is
not obliged to understand enough atmospheric physics to determine whether his
threat to global warming is too great to be tolerated. The McDonald's customer
does not have to wonder about the cow that made his meat. The girl getting
engaged doesn't have to wonder how many black South Africans burrowed miles
below the earth's surface for her gem.
These are matters which anyone can
take an interest in, and it is probably well that some people do. But we are
not all required to, and actually could not. Pressure groups exist to try to
force their particular agenda on to society, and they do a useful job in
attempting to keep us up to the mark. But that does not make them right when
they target selected, highly personalised, villains (say, customers of fur
shops) rather than address the political process as to whether an activity
(say, fur-wearing) ought to be proscribed. Besides, their energetic espousal of
this or that view does not have a particularly firm grasp of rectitude merely
because it is committed and dedicated. When pressure groups pit themselves
against interest groups, it is almost always forgotten that they have vested
interests too. Society is entitled to be sceptical, lackadaisical, traditional,
and permissive in face of their reforming zeal. This is not purely a matter of
laziness: the committed and the partisan are often wrong and narrow-minded, as
well as dogmatic. The rest of society is entitled to apply a leisurely
scepticism to their urgency.
These are the sorts of reasons why it was odd that in
Beverly Hills recently there was a proposal that fur products should be
labelled as having been killed by such means as gassing, electrocution and neck
wringing. Down that road madness lies. Firstly, the reality of such things is
not conveyed by a couple of words; secondly, the list ranges from the innocuous
to the tortured, and of the item in one's hand, one would have no way of
knowing which applied. Thirdly, to be just, such a stigmatisation would need to
be applied to all animal produce, of which the label would be equally true, and
equally misleading.
The protestors make various claims
about the popularity of fur which appear incontrovertible, but which are deeply flawed. They cunningly claim that
"the fur trade is a dying trade",[4] when
actually it is merely one with ups and downs, and currently a thriving world
wide market. What is more, they claim that the public is drifting away from fur
of its own accord. But there is good
anecdotal evidence that those women who now own furs would mostly have gone on
enjoyably wearing them if they had not felt castigated and endangered as they
did so. This is important. Fur wearing has remained attractive to those who
knew and liked it: they have been intimidated - not persuaded - out of wearing
what they want. The anti-fur protesters need to be seen as people who have
bullied people, but not won their minds. What is more, it is not true, as is
routinely claimed by protesters, that retailers ceased stocking fur because it
had become unpopular and unprofitable. For instance, there is evidence in
correspondence from Harrods that the store ceased to stock fur because it had
succumbed to intolerable animal rights pressure, and the threat of damage and
possibly violence it brought.[5] This in
spite of public protestations to the contrary.
So far from society having drifted away from fur because
arguments were presented to it, actually women who were enjoying buying and
wearing fur were forced to stop wearing it because they had been robbed of the
pleasure of the thing, and had nastiness imposed instead. Wearing fur went from
being a luxury to being at least unpleasant and quite possibly a danger.
The events of the past decade or so
have left the protesters believing that they have in effect won the argument,
if not yet finally been successful in driving the fur trade to extinction. In
truth, the argument has barely begun.
Public opinion polls are often cited as proving that the
public has a settled attitude of antagonism to the fur trade. [Eagle, 1999] But
in so far as this implies that the majority of British people dislike the
trade, this only means that a large number of people very ignorant of and
thoughtless about an issue has a firm view of it.
After all, the majority of people are either wholly ignorant
of the issue or in receipt of only one side of the argument. There is good
evidence that once they are more informed, instincts of fair play seem to take
opinion in rather different directions. It is especially noteworthy that when a
jury, picked to be representative of society at large, heard both sides of the
argument for a television show it voted seven to five in favour of the
"accused", a fur-farmer pleading to be allowed to continue his trade.
[Widdecombe, 1998] Both sides of the argument had been put, fairly and
squarely. What may have persuaded the jury above all was that the fur-farmer
was patently an ordinary Briton, who seemed likely to be speaking the truth
when he said he liked his animals the way any farmer likes his charges, and
would not knowingly harm them. This may well have been an efficient
reality-check for the jury.
The change of view once the "jury" has real
evidence, or a rounder context is a common phenomenon. There is good evidence that
people are suspicious about things about which they hear in the media (the NHS
in general, the water industry in general, politicians in general) but much
more positive about what they actually know (their doctor or hospital, their
water provider, their own MP). Similarly, there is good evidence that asking
the question, "Should scientists be allowed to experiment on
animals?", received a very different response from people asked it
"cold" and those asked a "warm start" version which
included the condition: Some scientists are developing and testing new drugs to
reduce pain… animal experiments…. make more rapid progress [possible]".
"Just 24 per cent of people were in favour, with 64 per cent against… On
the "warm start" question people backed animal experimentation by a
slim majority, with 45 per cent for, versus 41 against… a swing of 22 percent". Interestingly,
only two per cent of those polled had worn a fur coat or pursued blood sports,
but 62 per cent of this group clearly favoured animal experimentation:
arguably, their realism was allied with robust humanitarianism. [New Scientist,
1999]
All this leaves protesters in a
peculiar position. The most ardent protestors are almost universally from the
left, though many of their less active but occasionally vocal supporters are
not. The hard core had thought to have the argument going almost exclusively
their way. There were and are few voices raised in defence of the fur trade.
And yet the trade remains robust and capable of winning votes in favour of its
survival when it gets a decent hearing.
The media has never bothered to provide that hearing. Fur
has been discussed almost entirely, when it has achieved coverage at all, in
terms of its fashion interest and on fashion pages. These have occasionally ventured
into the issue and usually done so from a profoundly biased anti-fur point of
view. When fur has been in the news at the front of newspapers, it has been so
mostly when anti-fur protesters managed a stunt which seemed worthy of note in
its own right.
The media is seldom interested in the business of balanced
reporting in the issues it covers. It is most comfortable with the views of
campaign and protest groups which seem intuitively to be on the side of the
angels and to express the views of
"the people" and their thinking. Business, by contrast, gets
short shrift, as does science. On the other hand, if one is patient, most
issues will receive the coverage they deserve. The media has other instincts
than its socially and politically dissident attitudes. It has a low boredom
threshold and will in the end tire of almost any attitude it adopts. It loves
surprises. It also has a taste for the underdog. And then there is the
competitive spirit of the media: no attitude which appeals to the left or liberal
world will for long be popular in the rightwing press, and vice versa.
Thus, every position, and every
inclination, of the journalist is in constant turmoil, and under constant fire
and threat of overthrow. Greenpeace, for instance, has long been one of the media's heroes, accepted on all sides as a
source of good images, stirring stories, and populist comment. But that did not
protect the campaigners from criticism when the media began to perceive them as
over-mighty.
In the end, Shell's point of view over
Brent Spar did begin to come through, and Greenpeace's apparent triumph turned
to dust as the media turned on them. In the end, an honest reading of the BSE
risk has been filtering through. Already, about three months after it first hit
the headlines, the media is beginning to see that Monsanto's point of view on
GMOs may be at least as respectable as Greenpeace's. [North, 2000]
There is a detectable pattern to how
these events unfold. Greenpeace's victory over Shell, for example, prompted
journalists to wonder whether the campaigners' power was legitimate and to look
for the first time with some sympathy at Shell's position.
In the case of fur, by far the best
coverage the industry had ever received occurred when campaigners broke into
fur farms and released thousands of mink into the wild, in the New Forest
August 1998 and on the Staffordshire/Shropshire border in September 1998.
Suddenly, the plight of the animals and the danger they posed to indigenous
wildlife made journalists wonder whether the protesters were necessarily right.
Writers from the Daily Telegraph the Times were for the first time despatched
to write about the actualities of the farms rather than the myths perpetuated
by campaigners. [Times, 1998a; DailyTelegraph, 1998?; Times 1998b] The reports
were by and large pretty favourable. The journalists were perhaps surprised,
but also seemingly impressed, by the normality of the farms they saw. The next
burst of favourable coverage happened when Maria Eagle launched her Bill.
[Times, 1999a, Daily Telegraph, 1999c]. Most recently, the trend has continued
as the Government announced its bill. [Times 1999f]
Goodness
knows, finally, by what right mankind uses animals. Religious people may feel
they do so under some sort of license from the deity. The rest of us have to
come to some more obviously rational explanation. This is not the place for a
long discussion of the moral underpinnings for the human use of animals,
fascinating as that might be. What does matter here is to discus whether the
use of animals for their fur is any worse than the use of animals for anything
else. We are not arguing that fur-farming is especially virtuous, but that it
bears strict comparison with many other forms of animal use we do not condemn
half as much. We dare to go a little further: fur farming does not seem to
cause undue suffering by any of the rather good means humans have developed to
think about such things.
Millions of animals die every year to provide fur. About 85
per cent of them will have been raised in farms. About 85 per cent of the
animals will be mink, and of those about 85 percent will have been raised on
farms, the vast majority of them in Denmark, and rather fewer in Holland and
north America. A very few of these 30 million or so farmed mink - perhaps
120,000 - will have been raised in the UK. Of the fur-bearers, only mink are
raised in the UK. A handful of other species are raised in small numbers on
farms in other countries. The big majority of these non-mink animals are foxes
of various breeds, and most of those are raised in Finland and Norway.
One advantage of the concentration
of fur-farming in these old and affluent northern democracies is that the vast
majority of animals farmed for fur live and die in countries with law-abiding
farmers who are inspected by organised and thorough ministerial watchdogs. This
is not mostly a cowboy business.
It does, however, have its ugly
side. I don't mean that there is the necessity of killing the animals. We will
come to the apparently grim side of even good farming. What matters here is
that animal rights campaigners have been able to find a few examples of
manifestly bad and sometimes criminally poor farming. This is almost all the
general pubic knows of fur-farming: blurred videos and impassioned
denunciations are all they had to go on.
So far as I know, the
campaigners have no evidence of bad farming in continental Europe, nor of
widespread abuses anywhere. But Stella MacArtney, for instance, has done the
voice-over for a PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) video which
was sent to many fashion designers who have had the temerity to use fur. The
footage purported to show foxes, and other animals, on a US fur farm, and many
of the animals seemed very obviously to be in an appalling state of neglect.
The BFTA insist that this was not actually a fur farm at all.[6]
Nearer home, Respect For Animals
obtained footage, apparently in England, of mink in a state of excitement, and
perhaps of stress. This video was shown by Maria Eagle at a press conference to
launch her private member's bill to ban fur farming, and snippets of it have
been widely seen on British television. The animals are seen to rush about
their cages, clearly agitated. The difficulty, however, is that the place
involved is not identified. The animals might conceivably have been on a farm
(it would have been a very unusual as well as a regrettable one) on which
animals were routinely stressed and in need of help. But the material might
have been obtained by first deliberately exciting the animals and them filming
the resulting chaos. Respect has video
of disturbed animals on a southern England mink farm: but the British Fur Trade
Association insists the material dates from the chaotic months following
releases of the animals by rights activists. The careful pairing of animals,
and their entire way of life, was hugely disrupted and their behaviour on being
forcibly reunited and grouped with animals they did not know was predictably
vicious and confused.
Respect have filmed a worker on one
of England's 13 mink farms: it was footage which led to the man's being charged
and convicted on several counts of animal abuse in 1999. He was shown swinging
an animal through the air as it hung on to his hand by its teeth. This was
valuable and depressing information, so far as it went and may amount to the
only socially valuable work Respect has done.
At the worst it proved that a farmer
might be a member of the small British Fur Breeder's Association and not adhere
to adequate standards of staff management. The association's farmer-officials
were duly and rightly shocked and claim to have taken tighter control on
matters. As representatives of ten of the 11 licensed fur farmers, perhaps they
were remiss not to have been more rigorous, earlier.
Beyond
that, the film possibly demonstrated that it is quite easy to do mink farming
very badly, as it is easy to do any farming badly. It is also entirely possible, and highly
profitable, to do mink farming well. This latter is not easy, but then no
intensive husbandry is easy. It would not be the first thought for someone
seeking a quick buck. Indeed, the country's two leading fur-farmers have told
me they enjoyed mink-keeping since childhood, in very much the way another
country-dweller might enjoy keeping ferrets. They may have proved canny
hobbyists, but their trade began with the affection for their charges which
characterises a hobby.
There are few British fur farmers,
but several of them have taken interested neighbours and media around their
farms. The most persistently bold of these is Mike Cobbledick, of Cornwall, who
has received the same sort of attention from protesters as most fur farmers,
but has remained the most publicly unabashed and bullish about the quality of
his work and the well-being of his animals. To that end, he allowed TV cameras
on to his farm right at the height of the furore over Maria Eagle's bill to ban
his sort of husbandry. The resulting footage was seen on BBC's Countryfile and
Sky News and showed serried ranks of cages in airy open low sheds and within
each cage, breeding mink looking lively, relaxed, inquisitive, as they usually
do on well-run farms. Rather similar footage was shown on West Eye View, an HTV
series (which also gave an outing to the Respect footage discussed above). Had the cameras lingered, they might have
been able to catch the animals showing clear irritation and perhaps even fear:
mink do not like their territory for long being invaded by humans, however
friendly. At the right time of year, female mink could be shown with the annual
average of five young, rather more than they could expect in the wild, so fit
are they. The males could be seen grown to about twice their average weight in
the wild. Quite possibility their longevity would also be increased in
captivity, though that is not proven. If it were, that would complete the
triumvirate of advantages (fertility, healthiness and longevity) which are
normally conferred on creatures in well-managed captivity.
It is always easy to portray caged
animals as resentful, suffering and oppressed. The sight of wire alone will do
that. Add to that the fact that mink cages are not for long shiny and smart,
but mildly grubby, and one has a ready source of worrying images. But the
footage from Mike Cobbledick's farm goes a long way to reassure that on the
face of it mink are in good fettle.
Even so, impressions can be
misleading. The disinterested observer has to look behind the TV images for
something a little more rigorous as evidence. It may help that I have visited
five mink farms and seen only evidence which supports the Cobbledick rather
than the Respect view of what happens on well-managed farms. It is true that I
have only seen farms whose owners were invited by the trade to show me round.
They were farms the trade was proud of. Two were in England, and three in
Denmark. Of the Danish farms, two were research stations. One of the enemies of
mink farming, Professor Roger Harris of Bristol University's zoology
department, has suggested to me in a telephone conversation that I might have
been taken to farms just after feeding time when the animals were especially
relaxed, and suggested that this is would be an obvious ploy. But on
reflection, I remember having seen animals being fed, which presumes that I
also saw them just before they were fed. This is the time when their behaviour
is said to be most disturbing. Actually, I saw nothing odd. It is not unduly
significant that observers may see only good farms: the case in favour of
fur-farming needs to show that the thing can be well done and to accept that it
should be done as well as it can be, not prove that it is always done well.
Even my own impressions wouldn't
quite do as an indicator of animal welfare, even for my own satisfaction.
There is a good deal of academic
research work on farmed mink welfare, and some of it is English, serious and
recent. Much more of the work is Danish or Dutch. It comes from veterinary or
zoological departments of established universities. None of it was sponsored
directly by fur farm interests, though the trade has provided animals and
facilities to some projects at home and abroad.[7] Some of the continental work was sponsored by
state agriculture departments, who have a reputation for being as concerned
with commercial interests as they are with abstract matters of animal welfare.
However, even research sponsored by agriculture ministries has to survive peer
review, and the workers in such university departments have to be scrupulous if
they are to survive the implied taint which comes with their funding. It is
sometimes claimed that one of the journals used by Continental scientists for
their publications, Scientifur, is not adequately peer-reviewed. Actually, the
most important insights contained in papers there are to be found from the same
authors in peer-reviewed journals, so the point seems redundant.
One strand of Dutch work, that of Professor P R Wiepkema in
the 80s and 90s, and now followed on by Professor B M Spruijt, of the
University of Utrecht, corrals the best evidence available to propose reforms
in fur farming to the Dutch Minister of Agriculture, Nature Conservancy and
Fisheries and the Dutch Parliament. In 1995, all the parties agreed a ten year
Plan of Approach, or action plan. [Wiepkema, 1994; Spruijt, 1999]
All of the researchers who conduct
this work are respectable by any standards. Some believe that mink welfare is
approaching acceptability, and is in any case not easy to improve. Most believe
mink welfare to be amongst the best of any intensively farmed animal. Many hold
this belief having worked with other farmed species, or having worked alongside
others who do.
This general view was clearly not
held by the members of the Farm Animal Welfare Council, the British expert
advisory panel whose studies and recommendations have formed the basis of
Government efforts to improve conditions on animal farms since the 70s. This
group produced a two page report on fur farming in 1989 [FAWC, 1989]. It said,
"Mink and fox have been bred in captivity for only about 50-60 generations
and the Council is particularly concerned about the keeping of what are
essentially wild animals in small barren cages." But this was
self-evidently a cursory survey, based on few farm visits and citing none of
the available research, or experience, from abroad. Even so it did not condemn
fur farming out of hand, but struck a decidedly sceptical note and asked for
more research.
That seemed to be that. The UK
fur-farmers suffered constant protest activities, and fewer and fewer remained
in the business, partly depressed by the pressure against them and partly by
low prices during the world economic downturn in the early 90s. The glamour and
expense of fur did not suit the mood of a post-yuppy world in retreat from
excess.
Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food [MAFF] vets
continued to visit the gradually reducing numbers of fur farms, mostly to
ensure that mink were kept in sufficient security and were slaughtered
humanely. There was no intensive inspection of welfare matters, though the
trade had entered into a voluntary agreement about cage sizes and other matters
in the early 80s. The trade had also voluntarily invited inspection by
respected vets, and sought to improve their standards in the light of the
resulting reports. [Kelsall, 1999] They have told the UK Ministry of
Agriculture, Fisheries and Food that they could undertake to abide by the Dutch
reform process, especially in exchange for a similar period of stability in
which to make the necessary investments. [8]
The international development of
policy toward fur farming has mostly taken place in the Council of Europe,
which has corralled its member states in an agreement on guidelines for
farmers. The latest Recommendation of the Standing Committee of the European
Convention for the Protection of Animals Kept For Farming Purposes was adopted
on 22 June 99. British agriculture officials have played a prominent role in
the Council of Europe reform process, which
makes it all the more paradoxical that the current government should be more
interested in a ban than in reform, and not at all in a rational discussion of
the issues.
Until recently, British
non-specialist readers who wanted to understand mink welfare would have had no
easy way into the research material. There was no bibliography which brought
the material together. That was put right in 1997 by the Animal Welfare
Information Centre of the School of Veterinary Medicine at Cambridge
University. Commissioned by Respect, the Centre, headed by Donald Broom, the
university's professor of animal welfare (his name is on the cover as having
assisted the work), comprehensively trawled the literature and wrote a review
of it.
The document mentions in several
places various reforms to the existing cage system which might aid mink
welfare, and then, incongruously, goes on to say that the existing cage system
could not be reformed sufficiently to make welfare tolerable. Either of these
propositions might be true or false, but the two cannot sensibly be sustained
together.
The document might be taken as
making a case for reforms far wider than the trade would enjoy, but that
certainly doesn't make a case, nor does the document explicitly try to make a
case, for banning mink farming.
It is as well that the Broom
document has seldom been prayed in aid of the case for banning fur farming. It
is altogether rather a poor piece of work. It reads more like a partisan effort
of campaigning than a research document, or even a discussion document, which
might have claims to be worthy of a great university. Its conclusions seem to
be at odds with one another. It criticises the quality of much of the research
on which it bases its own conclusions. It relies on research papers alone to
reach conclusions which would have been far more credible had they been
supported - or capable of support - by an element of real-life discussion with
researchers, or visits to farms.
The document does at least represent
a comprehensive list of the available literature, and it charts pretty
successfully the main areas of concern.
Maria Eagle and the co-sponsors of
her Bill, Respect and the RSPCA, seemed to stick to much the same menu of
assumptions about this husbandry. The Government is likely to use much the same
rhetoric. It is a menu which seeks to make a case that mink farming is uniquely
bad. The case is built up by first asserting that the mink is a wild animal,
and a solitary predator at that. The argument is that in its 70 or so
generations of captivity the mink could not have changed in evolutionary terms
sufficiently for it to have adapted to being caged in close proximity to its
fellows.
This case continues by stressing
that the mink lives in relatively barren, small cages and asserting that these
cannot fully satisfy its basic needs, now identified in welfare thinking as the
Five Freedoms [Webster, 1994]. In fact, mink are well fed, grow well, reproduce
well and have, of course, spectacular coats. It is the unnaturalness of their
lives which alone seriously detains us. In particular, it is claimed that mink
might benefit from more space, more amusements, and from more (or less)
society. Above all, it is claimed that since mink are aquatic animals, they
should have access to water for bathing, showering or even swimming.
Denial of some of these amenities is
supposed to lead to stress which takes the form of fur-chewing,
self-mutilation, tail-sucking and the constantly-repeated rushing about,
twirling, head-spinning and other repeated, energetic behaviour patterns which
are called stereotypies and which are seen in different forms in elephants and
bears and many other animals in confined and deprived situations. [Budiansky,
1994]
And
then, finally, it is claimed, the animals receive a ghastly death by gassing
(though lethal injection is also allowed). We will look at all these
allegations closely, and find them wanting.
But before we start examining these
propositions in some detail, it is important to re-emphasise that they all
involve large amounts of theory and assumption. As we discuss them, it is worth
remembering that a visit to a mink farm shows animals which seem rather more
alert and lively than the average and very familiar domestic rabbit. It also
shows animals which never live more than six months unless to become engaged in
the breeding activity which we have every evidence to suppose is a chief joy in
the lives of all animals.
Are mink domesticated? Or, to put
the issue a little differently, are they wild? Does the fact that that they are
predators make any difference to either of these issues? It is clear that
farmed mink are not domesticated animals in the sense that they are not
normally much like the domestic animals we have at home. They are not tame. One
mink farmer told me that he had a neighbour who likes him to give her young
mink because she brings them up as house animals. I have also heard researchers
say that this is a very unlikely event, and that mink will always be unreliable
in close proximity to humans. But in any case, the case of an individual mink
which was specially domesticated, or tamed, doesn't take one very far. The mink
on a farm are not handled by humans every day, and are never petted by humans.
They are curious about humans, but grow impatient and even anxious if humans
hang about longer than they are used to.
In this sense, mink are indeed not
domesticated. But then, in this sense, neither is the pig or cow or chicken,
and few people throw the accusation at the herdsman or the poultryman that he
is abusing an animal which is not domesticated. Indeed, a Danish researcher has
pointed out to me that in contrast to other farm animals the mink has precisely
the advantage of not having been subject to enormous genetic changes. That is,
it has not been aggressively bred for fast or lean growth. The pig, cow and
chicken have all suffered from aspects of this sort of breeding, and the pig
and chicken have been - thankfully - the subject of what might be called
de-breeding in recent years. It has often been argued that the cow is
"over-engineered" for
stupendous lactation. [Webster, 1994]
The mink has been bred almost
exclusively with an eye to the convenience of both the farmer and the animal.
Are we to believe that it is a uniquely lucky farmed animal: sufficiently bred
away from wildness to be well-adapted to its circumstances, but not so
over-engineered that its productivity has brought new problems? Why not might
this be true? It is true that there are welfare issues surrounding selective
breeding for certain types of coat: but it would be easier and sounder to
outlaw or reform these rare practices within the husbandry than to ban the
husbandry outright.
If the mink has suffered less than
some animals at the hands of breeders, has it been changed enough to make it a
good candidate for captivity? The average male farmed mink is twice the size of
his wild counterpart, but he is not grossly fat, nor has he grown so fast that
his legs have difficulty supporting him (the fate, until recently, of at least
some chickens). The female mink has more living young than is normal under the
harsh conditions of the wild, but surviving young are a useful indicator of an
species' well-being, and can be thought so in this case. She certainly does not
have to produce abnormal quantities of milk, as the cow does, nor breed more
frequently than is "natural" as does the sow.
It is supposed by the campaigners
against fur farming that the mink is wild, and remains wild in spite of their
generations of breeding. What does this mean? The cat, to take a rather similar
example, is the most domesticated animal we know, and yet it remains in
important respects wild. Most cats, however domesticated and docile, are
capable hunters. Many cats have left their captivity or domestication and
become competent feral animals, living in the wild. So the undoubted truth that
some escaped mink set up in the wild with apparent success must imply that they
are at least wild in the sense that the domestic cat is. But by the same token,
the mink may not be any more wild than the domestic cat, either.
To keep a cat in a cage would be
supposed by many to abuse its nature. We would somehow feel that it is very
different from keeping a rabbit or a hen in a cage. But actually, whatever we
think about the prospect of moving our adult pet cat and making it live the
rest of its life alone in a cage is not to be compared with keeping a mink in a
cage. It is not even to be compared with keeping caged a cat bred after
generations of caged captivity. It is 70 generations since mink were removed
from their wild lives and, doubtless rudely, shoved into cages. We can
reasonably assume that something has happened to them since.
We do not have to believe that mink
have become domestic animals (as though they were pets), nor that they have
given up all the characteristics of being wild (any more than if they were
urban flat-dwelling cats). Even so, they may be very different from their wild
cousins.
Seventy generations of mink breeding
are claimed by some British scientists to be too short a time to produce
evolutionary changes by natural selection. But natural selection is not what is
at work here. Very intensive selective breeding is what has taken place. Mink
farmers have required animals which produced many fit young, grew good hair,
and did not fight or self-mutilate. Those animals which rebelled against
captivity by not reproducing naturally were lost to the gene pool, naturally.
Those that had other undesirable traits were deliberately excluded from it.
It is said that the first few
generations see the most genetic changes in animals when they are bred in
captivity. [See Appendix 1] So seventy years or more years ago, there may have
been a good deal of suffering before the strains of animals which could not
thrive in captivity were bred out. Even since then there might have been a good
deal of suffering if - as has not been demonstrated - fur farmers were
indifferent to the stress and misery of their animals, but were yet able to get
good commercial results from them.
To reinforce a sense that we can be
fairly relaxed about the well-being of mink on farms, we can take the visual
evidence of watching them and wondering how breeding might have produced such
an effect. But there is also good scientific insight that all animals bred for
domestication have smaller brains, which perhaps accounts for the relative
docility we can see in them. [See Appendix 1]
This modern strand of arguments sits
well with others that suggest that animals subject to captive breeding will
often maintain into adulthood features which more normally belong to the young
of their species. [Budiansky, 1994] These characteristics include curiosity,
trustingness, and a delight in affection. These characteristics are brought
about, in the wild or in captivity, by a propensity to breed from animals
before they are fully adult. It happens in the wild when species colonise fresh
territory. Fearless and curious animals, which will mostly be young, breed most
successfully in new circumstances and have the advantage of a relatively
unexplored ecological niche in which to do it. In domestication, this sort of
process is hurried along and intensified by selection by the farmer's breeding
programme, which seeks the same qualities and enjoys the third feature of
youthful animals (less useful in nature), an affectionate, or at least
amenable, nature.
Called neoteny, this phenomenon is explored most
comprehensively in Stephen Budiansky's Covenant of the Wild: Why Animals Choose
Domestication. [Budiansky, 1994] He argues that it applies to humans, too: all
domesticated species have what might called juvenile traits. These include a
responsiveness to certain facial features: large eyes, for instance. Thus, it
is argued, adult humans are very susceptible to the aesthetic appeal of young
animals, and those animals which remain wide-eyed in adulthood. This helps
explain the hopelessly ingrained anthropomorphism of humans. It is not that we
are thoughtful about them, or considerate of them, and that we consider the
care which we owe animals. No, we are moved by them as by our own young. We
are, in the truest sense of the word, sentimental about them.
Professor Harris has told me that
one of the reasons he is suspicious that mink might be called domesticated is
that animals so bred lose their ability to develop good fur.[9] I have
never seen evidence for that view, and it flies in the face of what we know about selective breeding. This
suggests, rather, that animals may quite quickly become well-adapted, innately
and literally, to captivity, whilst self-evidently keeping good fur-growing
qualities.
We are necessarily a little at sea
when we seek to understand whether an animal is "happy" about its
lot, and even more so when we consider what might be done to make it more happy
or less miserable.
The most respectable assumption is
that no one measure is likely to be enough. We certainly can't go by
appearances alone, or - which is often the same sort of approach - by analogy
to human wants. The most famous example of where this can go astray was in work
which assumed that chickens in battery cages would be bound to prefer to have
something more substantial than wire under their claws. It was not until Marion
Dawkins of Oxford University started to inquire of chickens what they wanted,
or rather, what they preferred, that we developed techniques for interrogating
animals. The results were often counter-intuitive. [Dawkins, 1993]
This sort of work is relevant, but
conclusions from it can be pushed too far. Some of the best recent work on mink
farming has, like Marian Dawkins', come from the department of zoology at
Oxford University. One piece of research "asked" mink whether they
would work hard in order to have access to swimming water. It turned out that
they would, and that they would work quite hard for it, and harder for bathing
than they would for a larger cage, for instance. [Mason, 1999] Some Danish researchers say
that it has not been demonstrated that mink for long go on relishing the
novelty of bathing water. [Hansen, 1995; Skovgaard, Jeppesen, Hansen, 1997] The
English researchers as strongly assert that they have demonstrated that they do
persist in the new taste.
Either way, this work does not by any means prove that mink
suffer when they do not have bathing water. We know nothing about the feelings
of mink who have never known water, nor what they feel once they've got used to
the fact that whilst it was once available it no longer is.
This leaves us in a peculiar
position. We have every reason to suppose that mink are quite like their wild
cousins and at the same time quite unlike them. Given a chance, they seem to
like swimming. Does it represent a denial, then, that the vast majority of mink
never have a swim?
We can never ask a mink about these
matters. Animals can't tell us whether they have a definite or even a vague
longing for things they don't currently have or have never had. We certainly
can't ask a mink what its perception of its unmet needs might be. It can't
itemise or prioritise its unmet needs for us. It can't say that it has vague ideas
of discontent, or precise ones. It may or may not have a notion of unmet need,
or may or may not have discontents to which it could put no name, nor imagine
any particular cure.
Mink
might quite like swimming or bathing, or even like them very much, when they
have them, just as humans might like the idea of holidays in the Seychelles.
But consider the implications of this analogy. Most people long for holidays in
the Seychelles long before they actually enjoy one. Most people for all of
history have had a long list of desirable things which they saw all about them
but they could never have. Once you were on a holiday in the Seychelles, and
were enjoying it, you would be very upset if it was suddenly truncated. You
might be angry if you were told that though an anticipated holiday in the
Seychelles had been promised, it was now to be denied you.
But
we ought to understand that most people never have a holiday in the Seychelles;
a holiday in the Seychelles is no one's birthright; people might not as much
enjoy a holiday in the Seychelles as they expect to; one might work hard for a
holiday in the Seychelles much more for the fact of putting one's feet up than
because one wanted, especially, to put one's feet up in the Seychelles; someone
who had loved a holiday in the Seychelles but knew they could never have
another might well be regarded as better off than someone who had never known a
holiday in the Seychelles at all; even people who long for a holiday in the
Seychelles might very quickly concede that there are far more important things
in life. Above all, no-one has ever claimed that, for all its being very
pleasurable, people can expect a holiday in the Seychelles, still less should
such an exotic holiday be listed as a prime need for people.
Similar
questions fairly arise about mink and their willingness to work for bathing
water. We can't ask them for their answers to the questions, but our own
answers to analogous ones indicate that merely because an animal will work for
things doesn't mean that they are necessary or even important.
One way of looking at
this issue is to suppose, as some recent work suggests, that animals have
innate needs. Roger Scruton, for instance, believes that horses have an innate
need to run with the herd, even if they have never done so.[10] This
language suggests that animals may have needs which are not translated into
wants: but this seems a little like suggesting that a need can be a sort of
unexpressed want. What would it mean to want something without knowing it or feeling
it? Chickens go through the motions of dust-bathing, whether or not they have
dust available. Is this a need? Does this mean they suffer if they never
actually dust-bathe? One might make a case, but not prove it, that hens might
more miss dust-bathing than mink miss swimming. Mink do not make the motions of
swimming and bathing in the absence of the sort of water in which they might
swim and bathe. They do no seem hard-wired to swim in the way that hens are
hard-wired to dust-bathe.
Still, knowing that mink do swim in
the wild remains troubling. Even the possibility that they may dislike swimming
in the wild and do it only because they need to will not give us much comfort.
We are trying to make them happy in captivity, and in captivity we have good
evidence that they like swimming, given the chance. They may do it with quite
different emotions than they swim in the wild. We simply don't know. Still, we
would need decent evidence that mink do not miss swimming and do not need
swimming for their welfare, if we wanted to continue to allow farmers not to
provide swimming water.
Can
we demonstrate that mink are well off in spite of lacking facilities which it
appears likely they would enjoy if they had them? This is where we need to look
at other welfare indicators from amongst the bundle of parameters by which we
might judge mink, or any, animal welfare.
The
most obvious one would be to look for signs of stress or discontent in mink
farms. There is a quite large literature about stereotypies, which are
repeated, abnormal behaviour patterns. [Budiansky, 1994; Hansen, 1995; CUAWIC]
They are often seen in captive animals. Elephants swing their trunks and sway
their bodies, often in unison with their companions, when bored in their lines
at circuses. Bears and other animals pace repeatedly along the same, sometimes
apparently irrational track, in zoos. These repeated activities are often signs
of boredom. In more frenzied form, they are taken to be signs of stress and
anxiety.
This behaviour in
animals has always been recognised as a sign of their discontent. Cardinal
Newman, for instance, used it as a paradigm of the human soul's unhappiness (in
his Dream of Gerontius, set to fabulous music by Edward Elgar:
It
is the restless panting of their beings:
Like
beasts of prey, who, caged within their bars,
In
a deep hideous purring have their life,
and
an incessant pacing to and fro.
In their version these discontents mink are
said to fight, chew their own tails and mutilate themselves: these activities
are said by protestors to be common.
Mink certainly have
been found to perform stereotypies and all the rest on farms. There are
references in research papers to mink doing so for up to half their waking
hours. But the fact that some references get stuck into the literature of this
behaviour having been seen is no more interesting than, for instance, a
selective fact about a celebrity getting stuck in the cuttings file of a news
agency. Before the cutting is of value in assessing the celebrity's current style
of life, one would first of all need to know whether the cutting was ever or
importantly true, and secondly whether it continued to be true. What's more,
thirdly, the behaviour of one celebrity might not be a very good indicator of
the behaviour of all celebrities.
Contrary to what is said by the campaigners and what is
relied upon by the Cambridge survey of research papers, there is rather little
evidence that nowadays mink must or even often do have behavioural oddities on
mink farms, and relying on a very few rather old papers doesn't help people
grasp the fact.
Continental
researchers who might be supposed to know about it insist that stereotypies are
not all that common on mink farms. They also suggest that these aberrancies are
not the best evidence of animal welfare. They come to this conclusion by
drawing on evidence that animals which are in other ways showing signs of good
welfare are more, rather than less prone, to show stereotypies.
This is evidence which bites both ways. If animals
displaying stereotypies are coping rather well, does this imply that animals
which do not stereotype may actually be suffering rather more, but - so to
speak - in silence? Now that stereotypies are rare, does this imply that the
suffering of which they are visible sign has been driven, so to speak,
underground?
How might we give an animal which shows no outward signs of
suffering the benefit of the doubt? How might we pursue the issue of its
well-being beyond its glossy coat, its appetite, the large number of its healthy
progeny, its apparent lively but relaxed behaviour? There is, mercifully,
another piece of welfare armoury which can be deployed. It is, like any of the
others, not much use by itself, and it throws up conflicting messages. But it
must surely be seen as contributing to a picture of tolerable welfare.
Work in Denmark
assesses the levels of various hormones to be found in the urine of mink in
different situations. Put simply, this sort of work, widespread in animal and
human physiological studies, distinguishes between an animal's periodically
producing stress hormones in response to challenges it deems exciting or
frightening, and its having - very differently - constantly to produce them
because its entire life is one of stress and frustration. The production of
stress hormones in the short-term can be taken to be a good or a bad thing
according to whether one thinks that an animal has been subjected, say, to
sudden and fearful events, or to the expectation of pleasurable ones. An animal
anticipating unpleasantness will produce stress hormones, but these will also
be an indication, for instance, that the animal expects shortly to have
intercourse or food. The chemical signs of excitement don't distinguish between
these very different stimuli.
In either case the animal is readying itself for activity,
whether fighting, fleeing, feeding or fornicating. If challenges continue for
too long, too continuously, the animal's "base" level of hormones
becomes high. It moves from registering occasional bursts of excited
preparedness to maintaining constant high levels of production of hormones in a
way which becomes a drain on its metabolic resources.
We can readily see why this might be so. These
"readiness" responses signal and trigger a diversion of resources - energy,
blood - away from functions such as digestion, the immune system, reproduction.
An animal cannot indefinitely repair these systems whilst diverting energy to
the permanent maintenance of a system designed for period use.
The Danish researches into these hormone levels suggest that
healthy mink on well-run farms display satisfactory levels of intermittent
hormone production and equally satisfactory levels of background hormone. In
other words, by the indicator of hormone production farmed mink seem to be in
satisfactory metabolic condition.
One other indicator is prayed in aid of the idea that mink
routinely suffer. Some research suggests that they suffer high levels of
stomach ulcers, a classic indicator of routine excesses of stress. But
actually, one specialist Danish researcher stresses that stomach ulcers are not
very common in mink, and where they do occur, do so at rather low levels. It is
not even clear that stomach ulcers are a clear indicator of stress: they are as
likely to be an indicator of bacterial infection. [11] [Harri,
et al, 1995]
We can see now how the welfare of mink does not conform at
all well to the protestors' ideas of it. We can look at the ordinary person's
perception of mink on farms; at some ideas about ethology; at the metabolic
status of the animals, and wherever we go we find evidence that it makes decent
sense to say that the animals appear to be quite well off. There is no
overwhelming evidence from most of the parameters that might dismay us. A
worrying question remains: is the element of doubt sufficient to make us want
to improve the animals' welfare?
Suppose
we were not content with the welfare of mink, and wanted to do something about
it. Where would we begin? There is the laborious process to discuss improvement
in mink welfare at European Union and Council of Europe levels, and the latter
has produced guidelines which broadly enshrine the best of the existing Danish
practices. One of the prime requirements mink appear to "request" in
behavioural tests is a nesting box. This has now been an absolute minimum
requirement on mink farms for years, and no one disputes its value. It might
seem a kind idea to give mink more space, and new Council of Europe guidelines
enshrine this idea. Research suggests that actually mink place only a medium
priority on this, but it is a move which satisfies human prejudices and may be
useful to the mink, too.
One of the problems in mink welfare is to know what sort of
social lives the animals might benefit from. It is interesting that the protesters
often draw attention to the fact that the mink is solitary in the wild. From
this it is commonly deduced that the proximity of one caged mink to another is
offensive to them. It is true that mink seem happiest if they can't even see
their neighbours at certain times of the year, but it is equally true that they
benefit from visual contact at other times. [CUAWIC.]
There
is good evidence that young mink do best if they are allowed to stay with their
mother for some time, and indeed for roughly the period they would have with
her in the wild. [CUAWIC, Hansen, 1995] It isn't easy to be sure what is the
ideal weaning period: it might not match the period the mother tolerates her
young around the nest in the wild before she boots them out to fend for themselves.
In the wild, there may be a good deal of unpleasantness in that period, and
there is evidence that early weaning benefits the mother's welfare. [CUAWIC]
Modern mink farmers tend to allow about 7 or 8 weeks before
weaning the young, and it is suggested that this should be extended to about 11
weeks, a practice which has been shown to reduce tail-biting in the young. I
any case, farmers then they do something that absolutely does not happen in the
wild, and which the protesters complain about, but which seems to be a major
contributor to the well-being of the young.
At about the time when young mink
would be hunting and establishing themselves as solitary animals, farmed mink
are put in sibling pairs. It may well be that these young then establish a
pecking order, but if so there is no sign of aggressiveness or bullying.
Indeed, the mink seem to spend a good deal of time curled up together.
Prolonged sibling companionship, is perhaps a sign of what can be achieved with
animals who are brought up in particular behaviour patterns when very young.
But, like the value of delayed weaning, it also fits with general research that
suggests that very young animals go on to flourish if they have what might as
well be called emotional support in their earliest days and weeks. [Sapolsky,
1994] What's more it fits with ideas we gather from neoteny about domesticated
animals being particularly hungry for warmth, attention and companionship.
[Budiansky, 1994]
The majority of farmed mink, then,
are born and then go on to have particularly warm and close relations with
various close family members for the few months they live until they are
slaughtered.
A proportion of young mink are
selected to go on to have two, three, four or even more years as breeding
mothers, which have a solitary life punctuated by rearing young for the spring
and summer months. The far less numerous
breeding males have the same number of years with a yet more solitary
life which is only interrupted during a period as studs for a month every year.
Both these adult females and males seem to thrive, but there is legitimate
discussion about what could plausibly be done to improve their lot.
One possibility is to take the same
amount of space as is occupied by solitary cages and to see if social groups
might be arranged to provide more interest to the breeding females and males.
So far, research indicates that some approaches to group housing might be
commercially possible and beneficial in welfare terms, but on neither count is
it overwhelming [Spruijt, 1996].
Interestingly, one avenue that might
prove profitable draws on the idea that the problem for mink in captivity may
not be that they suffer so much as that they might be bored. They may need more
of the right kind of stress. Mink are certainly very interested in their food:
most stereotypy behaviour appears to have taken place when mink had long waits
for it and they become excited before feeding time on the best regulated farms.
(The breeding females and males get very agitated, too, in the run-up to
breeding: rather as humans do.) This behaviour may not deserved to have been
called stereotypy at all: any domestic cat gets very excited, and paces up and
down, when it senses the availability of food.
Canny management of feed times has
hugely contributed to reducing stereotypies. [Budiansky, 1994; Wiepkema, 1994]
It may be that a useful approach to mink welfare will be not the provision of
more facilities of the kind which might seem obviously comfortable, but the
provision of more work and more challenges in their lives. It might be that
working harder for food, or displaying more ingenuity before getting it, might
produce more of the "good" kind of stress and stave off the bad kind
of stress which might be supposed to, but can't be seen to, have arisen from
boredom.
It makes sense to continue to put a
certain amount of effort into researching improvements in mink welfare. These
efforts should not be seen as exceptionally necessary to redeem an
exceptionally cruel practice: they should be seen in the context of the
continuing need to see what can reasonably be done to improve the lot of all
the animals we keep for our convenience and pleasure.
We need to continue to stress that
mink do not have atrocious lives, and also to suggest that they face up to the
way these and other animals die. Mink are, as the protesters never fail to
point out, gassed.[12] Professor Harris went so far on West Eye View
as to equate this gassing with what happened to the Jews in the holocaust.
It happens that gassing a creature
with carbon monoxide is one of the least traumatic ways to kill it and that
this is so much the case that it has seemed a bad idea to have carbon monoxide
in common use. Suicides have always favoured it. The trade has been constrained
to use carbon dioxide instead. Now it is true, as research has indicated of
mink, that given the choice creatures will
not voluntarily inhale carbon dioxide. [Cooper & Mason, 1998] But
CO2, which is used on mink farms produces unconsciousness in a very few seconds,
and death in about half a minute. It does not matter how true it is that
gassing was used in a great human tragedy, nor that researchers can show that
given a choice, mink will shy away from the stuff. What matters is that every
year mink farmers walk quietly down their rows of cages and quietly pick up one
animal after another and place it firmly into a box within which the mink has
no choice but quickly and quietly to inhale what is at first an anaesthetic and
then a killer.
It is not given to any other farm animal to have so quick
and quiet a dispatch. The mink does not suffer the surprise and shock of
suddenly being transported many miles to a slaughter house. It has instead a
death which would be the envy of any of us were it not for our entirely reasonable
expectation that the timing of our death should not be in the hands of people
who are thinking of their convenience rather than ours. The mink, like other
animals, has no such awareness of impending death.
We need to touch briefly on the
issue of fox farming, though none of that is done in the UK. This is a practice
mostly carried out in the northern Scandinavian countries, and it raises many
of the issues which apply to mink. There are significant differences, though.
The literature on these animals is much more slight, but leads to a conclusion
which is at first rather worrying.
Foxes seem to have a rather
complicated social life: it is solitary and sociable by turns, and in rather
complicated ways. [CUAWIC] The upshot seems to be that foxes thrive best if it
is understood that they seem to have a virtually inalienable sense of social
status, and need to be kept in such a way that a dominant animal is not placed
too near a very subordinate one, even if they are in separate cages.
There is good evidence that foxes
respond well to quite aggressive social contact with humans. [CUAWIC] Rough but
affectionate handling when young seems to have the effect of habituating them
to contact with humans, and makes their life on farms pleasanter than if they are
left alone, and in a state of natural dread of their keepers. These are
essentially tameable animals, and in that sense they are very different to
mink. They may be brought far more easily and obviously positively to like
their human captors. Again, experiments are taking place which give foxes a far
more social life than they normally have in their solitary cages: it may turn
out that these work well.
The literature and discussions with
researchers tends to suggest that fox-keeping can be and often is done well.
Trapped
animals
The
fur trade has a slightly easier job when it comes to defending fur-trapping.
After all, the lives the animals live in the wild, however awful, are not its
business. It has only to take account of the deaths of the animals it traps.
The archetypal image of the fur trade comes from the north
American outback where white or indigenous trappers work traplines many miles
from civilisation. The modern reality has changed a little. Trappers tend to be
able to commute to their lines more easily, and to move around them on
motorised snowmobiles rather than with dog sleds.
Trappers have changed a good bit.
The white trapper will often be the owner of a fishing concession and a tourist
business, with trapping a partial support to see him through the winter. The
indigenous trapper will often be an Indian, or further north, an Inuit. But
nowadays he (or she, many of the best hunters are women) will usually be an
individual who is disinclined to spend their life entirely dependent on welfare,
which is the majority experience of the vast majority of non-whites who stay in
their homelands.
It happens that the whites are on
average more dedicated and efficient trappers than the non-whites (known in
Canada as aboriginals, or First Nation peoples), so they contribute
disproportionately to the harvest of fur-bearing animals.
There
have been repeated attempts to defend the north American fur-trade as a bolster
to the dignity and economy of the indigenous peoples, and that is fair enough
so far as it goes. However, it is worth remembering that far more fur comes
from the fur-farms in the region than from traplines and even in the case of
the latter, more from whites than from aboriginals.
Even so, the
fundamental appeal of trapped fur over farmed fur ought to be that the animals
killed are wild; and the men and women who take them are brave and hardy; and
the activity takes place in country of austere, wild beauty.
In animal welfare terms, the prime
defence of fur trapping ought to be that it rather reduces animal suffering in
the wild than increases it. The human dimension is moving, but it would hardly
by itself legitimise animal suffering, were that to be much increased by human
activity. Oddly enough, though, trapped animals in the wild almost always have
less painful and prolonged deaths than are accorded to their fellows which die
naturally.
This
counter-intuitive fact is simply explained. Left to themselves, wild
fur-bearing animals die from accident, disease or decrepitude, all of which
finally mean they can no longer hunt, so they go on to freeze or starve. It is
no use thinking about trapping as though the fate of animals would otherwise be
a Disney romance. Wild animals live in a desperately hard environment and with
a natural fate of appalling brutality. Nature is neither moral nor kind. The
men and women who go trapping understand this and are able to see, what the
rest of us seldom can, that their work needs only to stand comparison, not with
a romance of the wild, but its reality.
The majority of trapped animals are
small enough to be caught in traps which are designed to kill their victim very
nearly instantaneously. The efficiency of these traps is demonstrated in
research programmes, especially in Canada, where methods are tested for
reliability. The vast majority of animals taken in these traps are killed
within seconds, or at most a few minutes. [Appendix 2] There must be failures
and mistakes, and these doubtless cause suffering. Researchers and
knowledgeable trappers claim these accidental victims are few, and the
suffering they cause needs to be set in the context of the common and regular
possibility of accidents occurring in the wild anyway.
Trapping
is controlled so that only abundant species are trapped, and only trapped when
they are abundant and not breeding. Fur-bearers are killed in their full winter
coat, when their young, if any, can fend for themselves.
Only
the large animals are trapped in devices which are designed to hold them until
the hunter returns to dispatch them. The majority of such animals - say wolf,
fox and lynx - are taken using the leghold trap. It is a standard claim by
protestors that animals caught in these traps are mutilated by the action of
the jaws and then suffer as they struggle to release themselves.
There
is indeed apparently powerful video and photographic evidence of animals
struggling in leghold traps. However, that may be no more than evidence that
some at least of the suffering endured by trapped animals occurs when humans approach
them whilst the animals cannot flee.
The
clearest evidence that leghold traps do not conform to the protestors'
stereotypes is their use in situations where conservation managers want to move
individuals or whole packs of wolf or fox from near towns. Here, the leghold
trap is used because it is capable of holding the animal unharmed for later
release. Trap researchers insist that there is good evidence that animals
caught in leghold traps most usually lie quietly when held, and especially if
the trap is placed so that the animal can get itself into a sheltered place
where it will be undisturbed. The only kind of leghold trap now permitted in
north America is designed to hold but not to tear or damage an animal's leg:
after a great deal of persuasion and doubt I once allowed one to be snapped
onto my hand without feeling pain.
The leghold is commonly used to trap beaver: in this case,
the animal is held underwater, and it seems obvious that it will drown.
Actually, beaver trapped underwater have a quieter death than might be
supposed. Because they hold their breath, they in effect die from carbon
dioxide poisoning within three or four minutes of being trapped. They don't
drown at all; they asphyxiate.[Appendix 2]
Obviously, there is a profound
distinction between a trap designed to kill outright and one designed to hold
an animal alive, and it is hardly surprising that there have been many
proposals to outlaw the leghold: these have now reached the point where the
major players (as concerned consumers, or producers: the EU, US, Canada and
Russia) have agreed to submit evidence to a Council of Europe forum about the
humaneness of any leghold or other trap they plan to use, or accept a ban at
least on the sale of fur animals caught in prohibited traps.
In the meantime, it is useful to
note that the majority of animals trapped in legholds meet this fate for
conservation reasons. The animals suffer in some degree, but not because of the
fur trade. The pity of it is that, having suffered in some degree, the full
value to humans of the by-product - their fur - is not utilised. The
authorities in Louisiana, for instance, pay for huge numbers of nutria (called
coypu in Europe) to be trapped: a better acceptance of the practice and a more
vigorous fur trade would merely ensure the costs of the operation were met by
consumers rather than taxpayers, whilst giving people the pleasure of wearing
fur. [Appendix 3] In the Netherlands, hundreds of thousands of coypu are
trapped every year to preserve the dyke system: but the sale of the fur is
banned, so it is wasted.
The public sometimes has a lingering
expectation that the wild animals it loves are at risk from the fur trade.
Actually most trapping is done for conservation or species management reasons.
There is a persistent misunderstanding that the fur trade uses or endangers
rare species. The fact is that the fur trade is very highly visible and that
the trapped furs it can use have for at least two decades been regulated under
CITES regulations designed to forbid trade in endangered species. [13] There
is good evidence that there are more of most of the trapped species than there
were several hundred years ago.
Chapter Three:
The Authorities
Fur-wearing
is deeply offensive to a small minority of the public. These people must be
allowed to protest however wrong or silly many of their arguments and views
are.
Some of the protest takes place every Saturday outside the
two furriers in the West End, and during the week outside the remaining furrier
in Knightsbridge. Sometimes this protest is dignified. In these moments, it has
something of the character of bearing silent witness. But more often, it is
noisy and sometimes it is directed full-on, face-to-face at any customers
daring to run the gauntlet. The shouted slogans tend to include: "Fur
trade, death trade", and anyone working in the shops or using them will be
routinely called a murderer, scum, and worse.
At least this protest is happening in roughly the right
place: in public. However, some of the more committed protestors pride
themselves on getting the home addresses of anyone - customer or staff -
associated with the trade. At home, such people will often get oh-so polite
letters reminding them of their moral duty to animals and inviting them to
reconsider their work or purchases. To receive such mail is of course very
frightening. The letters are mild enough, but they clearly signal, what the
protesters will sometimes whisper to people they know are associated with the
trade: "we know where you live". We know what that means when we hear
in a gangster movie and we know what it means when George Robertson, the
defence secretary, uses it in the House of Commons of Slobodan Milosovic of
Yugoslavia. The letters addressed to employees' homes could all perfectly easily,
and more appropriately one might think, be directed to the individuals at work:
but they are written to people at home, and surely for a purpose.
This behaviour is meant to be menacing, and is. Furriers
have on occasion received letter bombs at home, though not recently. Small
chanting crowds, damaged cars and daubed signs are the more normal recent
currency. The threat of worse, and the memory of worse, keeps the furriers
under the hammer.
Oddly, the animal rights protesters outside retailers are
not above using racial abuse to any black person they know to be associated
with the fur trade. Some protesters draw their finger across their throat when
looking at customers or staff. Some of these signs are less ambivalent than
others.
Should right-minded people give
protest the benefit of the doubt when this sort of thing goes on, or masked
groups visit fur farmers and fur merchants at home and daub their houses with
slogans, slash their car tyres, leaflet their neighbours suggesting that the
target is a paedophile?
What are we to make of the disclaimers of visible groups
like Respect that the shadowy groups are nothing to do with them? The routine
response by public spokesmen tends to be something like, "We don't do this
sort of thing ourselves, and can't condone it, but we don't condemn it either,
and we understand how people who feel strongly about animals may well in their
passion behave in this way towards people who make animals suffer". Even
the Animal Liberation Front does not claim itself to be murderous, but does
operate what one newspaper called a "Sinn Fein-IRA relationship" with
the harder types of the "Animal Rights Militia", whose death rates
against vivisectionists the ALF relays. [Sunday Times, 1998a]
Surely the "more respectable" are made less so
when the tone of their disavowal is so feeble? Should we not treat their moral
case about animals with scepticism when the moral quality of their human
behaviour is so flawed? It would be one thing to reach for protest of any sort
in a situation where debate was stifled and legislation patently undemocratic,
but those of us who inhabit a media
world and a democracy should surely wonder when we watch confrontational
behaviour and worse from campaigners.
There is of course a long tradition of radical dissent, and
religious dissent, and it has always perturbed onlookers to decide whether it
was the fanaticism or the idealism of the extremist which most struck them. In
the 17th century Antinomianism was identified as the condition of
believing that one's religious cause put one above the law [Hill, 1975]. More
recently, the word has been used to suggest the kind of extreme Bohemianism
which the early 19th century Romantics adopted as an almost
deliberate and very secular affront to society. [Johnson, 1991]. Given so
responsive and permissive a society as ours, modern extreme protest might
reasonably be taken to be something volunteered for and enjoyed, rather than
something people are constrained to undertake if they are to make any progress
at all. The difficulty now is to understand how seriously to take the protest:
should we take it at the protestors' own estimation, or are we free - obliged,
even - to put their passion on one side and look merely at their case? We are
brought up to believe that martyrdom has an honourable tradition, but what are
we to make of a Barry Horne, who is serving an 18 year sentence for a two year
fire-bombing campaign, and who in December 1998 threatened to starve himself to
death unless the Government set up a royal commission on animal
experimentation? Was he a martyr or a blackmailer? Luckily, one might say, most
of us did not have to make a judgement: the Government declared itself not open
to blackmail and Horne resumed his Vegan diet, though with what were reported
to be irreversible health effects from his action. [Sunday Telegraph,
1998a] Barry Horne was said by one of
his acquaintances to be obsessive: "He has no social life to speak of, his
only passion is animals". But this is not the whole picture: an activist
who left the ALF told one newspaper that, "The whole time I was with them,
we never actually discussed animals. They are not really animal lovers… They
are anarchists who view the use of animals as a political conspiracy and human
cruelty. Some of them even told me they don't even like animals. They use the
argument that you don’t have to like black people to want to liberate them. It
is a mindset which allows you to bomb people with immunity (sic)" [Sunday
Telegraph, 1998b] Modern protest can turn into terrorism "inspired by
singe issues, such as environmental degradation, animal rights, or
abortion", according to the International Institute of Strategic Studies.
[Times, 1999c]
Part of the difficulty is that
whilst it is clear that almost all the active protesters against fur indulge in
some unpleasant behaviour or worse, it is very hard to prove that many of these
visible protesters are the same people as turn up in balaclavas at the homes of
furriers and fur-farmers.
In the summer of 1999, after two
years of intense campaigning and high profile demonstrations, various groups,
including save the Hillgrove Cats succeeded in forcing Christopher Brown to
give his cat farming business in Oxfordshire. In the period Thames Valley
Police spent £3 million protecting the farm, at least 350 have been arrested
and 21 jailed for public order offences. The farmer's family had been
firebombed, the house burnt, the windows broken on many occasions, cars
vandalised. Finally, in June 1999, the 62 year old farmer's wife was attacked
and shackled to a fence whilst walking the family dog. She was released after
ten minutes. It should be enough to say that the farm was licensed by the Home
Office, that it did no experimentation, that the cats from it were mostly used
for veterinary research, that most suffered in the whole of their lives no more
than any cat undergoing vaccination. [Daily Telegraph, 1999d; Independent,
1999] The target of complaint should always have been the Home Office and
Parliament, and the manner always strictly open and peaceable. Instead, there
is hardly any coverage of the merits of the case fro experimentation, and
those, such as Professor Colin Blakemore, who are knowledgeable enough to make
the case must run the risk of even more intense campaigning and harassment for
their pains. [Sunday telegraph, 1998
A greater difficulty is to
understand where to draw the line between the competing rights of
fur-protesters and fur producers or fur wearers. Should the protesters' right
to protest be paralleled by the right of fur-wearers to the enjoyment of their
hard-earned coat? Granted that there is a clear right to protest, should there
not be a parallel right to the quiet enjoyment of legal activities, such as the
purchase and wearing of fur?
How is one to police such an issue,
especially granted that the protesters may actively enjoy not merely being
intellectually dissident but also treasure their perceived right to break the
law in their higher moral cause?
The previous, Tory, government introduced legislation designed
to make squatting on land and massed protests more difficult. In response to
the problem of men and fans stalking women and celebrities, they introduced a
measure, which became the Protection From Harassment Act, 1997, which outlawed
various sorts of aggressive and persistent behaviour. [Lawson-Cruttenden, et
al] It introduced an element of criminal
law into issues which had previously been a largely civil matter and it was
regarded as a rather untidy piece of work. One of its effects was to make it possible
for people who could prove they were receiving very unwelcome or threatening
invasion of their privacy to have a no-go area declared around their person or
property. This would exclude certain named or identifiable harassers. It has
been used, almost by chance, by a very few people in the fur trade to have
animal rights protesters excluded from the neighbourhood of their homes.
At first, during 1998, the
anti-harassment legislation was also used to exclude protesters from the close
vicinity of a particular furrier's shop in the West End. A legal quirk has
meant that it has not been enforced recently, because the means to declare
exclusion zones came into force before the means to apply the criminal law to
people who broke their terms. When the latter took effect, police felt that the
plaintiffs ought to go back and get a fresh exclusion zone injunction since its
effect had changed. The furrier concerned has not felt that the expense was
warranted or fair.
The Harassment Act has a curious
effect. Its use to protect a private address seems somehow more justified than
its use around a shop, which is by definition a place in the public arena. In
this latter case, the police interpreted the Act to mean that protesting groups
which included people included in the exclusion order should be kept several
hundred yards from the shop front, whatever the style of protest they wanted to
pursue.
No
one has tested what the Act might mean in its present form for such protest,
but it seems on the face of it rather heavy-handed.
For the most part, the policing
of protest is a matter of the police having to prove that a definite criminal
act, or obstruction, or a Breach of the Peace is likely. These last two
especially are very tricky areas, with new law to be interpreted, such as the
Public Order Act 1986. The police and lower courts often find themselves
over-ruled by higher, or European courts. [Times, 1999d; Times, 1998c] A
policeman has to believe that confrontations are such as likely to lead to
violence before he can arrest someone, who may justifiably be kept away from
the scene for a while, or, in more serious cases be brought before magistrates
to be bound over to keep the peace in future. An alternative is for the police
to claim and prove that protesters are obstructing traffic or the pavement.
These are necessarily grey areas, and recent high court and House of Lords
judgements have reinforced the carefulness with which police must proceed.
Several major cases have found in favour of protesters, and made the police
feel less secure that old understandings about where to draw these difficult
lines will be supported in court. Meanwhile, the Government is consulting (as
of September 1999) on proposals to bring anti-terrorist measures to bear on
protestors whose actions cross from the peaceful to the threatening.
In one fascinating recent case, a
magistrate in the north east allowed some highly active protestors to go free
after some particularly aggressive behaviour in "an action" at a fur
farm had led to arrests. He suggested that the unpopularity of fur-farmers -
which he supposed rather than proved - somehow legitimised this behaviour. In
June 1999, the appeal court told him to revisit the judgement. Interestingly,
whilst the protesters claim that the fur trade is unpopular, the trade has its
own respectable poll evidence to support the idea that much animal rights
protests offends public opinion on how far protest can legitimately go.
The judgements which appear to be
rewriting the rules on protest make good reading for libertarians, and maybe
for those who are not under threat of protest from animal rights or other
self-appointed guardians of the nation's morals. They must please writers such
as George Monbiot of the Guardian who wrote: "Britain is on the brink of
the biggest civil rights clamp-down in recent history… Trouble-making is a costly nuisance, a drain on public resources,
an impediment to the smooth functioning of government. It is also one of the
only means by which our political leaders can forced to address the concerns of
the excluded, the dispossessed or, indeed, anyone who does not number among
their target audience". Thus, the joined-up-writing wing of the Swampy
tendency. It is thinking reflected in many of the children of the post-war
middle class and affluent who are now spear-heading campaigning activism,
alongside more obviously punk ne'er-do-wells such as were seen in the recent
Carnival Against Capitalism. [The Times, 1999]. It is the kind of thinking
which characterised the campaigning in Seattle during the opening round of
World Trade Organisation negotiations in Seattle in November 1999.
It
is not clear that we are making much progress in developing a way of dealing
with the increasingly vociferous and active protest against various activities
which were always controversial but which protestors have made confrontational.
In the cases of genetically modified organisms, hunting, fur, animal
experimentation and intensive animal production for the human food chain we see
five activities which pit views of man's dominion over, or obligation toward,
the natural world against each other. All have produced direct action groups.
All have produced threats to property. Some have produced violence, or threats
of violence, against people. Any might descend into serious violence. All
produce a tension between the rights of wider society and those of highly
committed people who oppose each other.
In the case of fur, we can see some
of these interactions at their sharpest. The broad majority of the public would
at the very least tolerate the wearing of fur. But this permissiveness is not
unequivocal. Many such people might nonetheless feel that the protesters are
perhaps more moral, by taking an interest, than the silent majority. In any
case, the opponents and the proponents of fur are both very determined. The
tensions between them raise moral questions, and policing questions too. The
tensions between them are not such that society can easily stand aside.
It is typical of the British
approach that Parliament and the police in general do try to shield the fur
trade and its customers from the worst effect of protest. But they do so within
quite a firm sense that their response must not be disproportionate. Some
academic researchers using animals have put up with years of more or less
constant threat and abuse from protesters with few penalties imposed on the
latter. Furriers and fur farmers have
endured more intermittent and usually less dramatic threats, but frightening
ones nonetheless.
One way to resolve the tension
between protesters and the trades or practices they hate is to outlaw the
latter. No one has yet dared seriously to propose a law banning the wearing of
fur, but the Eagle bill was of course an attempt to outlaw fur-farming. In this
it mirrored the New Labour manifesto with its overt populism and a concomitant
tendency to ignore the rights of minorities, amongst them the hereditary peers,
landowners, hunting people, and fur farmers.
The new government came to power
with a manifesto on several of these issues. Animal rights, like countryside
access and reform of the House of Lords perhaps seemed like relatively easy and
attractively radical measures for a government which wanted to be thought
radical but was rather thoroughly conservative.
It has found fox hunting to be a
more complicated political issue than it at first thought it would be. Luckily,
from its point of view, the matter was pressed by a labour backbencher, whose
private members bill to ban hunting could and did fail without much implicating
the government. Now, the Government has initiated an inquiry into the likely
effects of a hunting ban, and can thus delay and perhaps postpone indefinitely
any further legislation.
It seems that the fur farmers have
proved an irresistible target. With so many promises on "animal
welfare" made, New Labour's inner councils probably felt that something
bold and clear needed to be done, somewhere. In the absence of a clear welfare
logic, the Government needed a new language to cover a policy which was
populist, but whose enactment could not be based on anything quite so obviously
flawed. "Public morality" has been invoked as a novel ruse. It is a rather shocking new principle,
since it could as easily be invoked against any populist cause which claimed a
moral dimension, but whose moral dimension was transparently inadequate to be
argued seriously.
From a purely pragmatic point of view, the issue now facing
the government is fairly simple. It said in its manifesto that it would
ban fur farming, and the debates on
Maria Eagle's bill has allowed it to see where the main stumbling blocks are.
Beyond some issues of definition, the worst problem seems to be how badly
various fur-farming nations within the EU may take a unilateral ban, and, more
prosaically, what would be the right level of compensation for the farmers
whose activity would be banned.
In principle, fur farming nations
could probably live quite easily alongside a Britain which did not allow fur to
be farmed but did not outlaw the produce of nations that did. Compensation
might be a bit more difficult. Several and perhaps all British fur farmers
would like to get out of the business if they could do so on terms which
allowed them to set up in something else or retire. The protestors make much of
the dissension within the ranks of the trade on this, noting with delight that
the farmers themselves are more willing to gave up than the rest of the trade
is willing to see them do so. Actually, of course, the farmers do not concede
the protestors' principle, but do accept pragmatically that protest has made
their lives all but intolerable. If they could be compensated sufficiently,
abandoning their farms becomes attractive.
But such terms were
not offered to pig farmers who were made to invest in (rather dubious) animal
welfare measures or get out of the trade.
Indeed, objections would certainly
be raised as to why a farmer should be compensated for giving up practices
which have been declared unacceptable by Parliament.
An argument in favour of so
compensating fur farmers goes like this. Here is a trade of which nothing
exceptional can be proved or even seriously suggested. It is a trade which is
allowed by all our major trading partners. It is the subject of ongoing reform
measures in international forums of which Britain is a part. It is a trade
rendered expensive to undertake, and also dangerous to undertake, because of the determined and illegal activities of
protesters. If such capricious measures are to be taken, every other user of
animals will need reassurance that their activities are seen as legitimate, and
likely to be the subject of compensation arrangements. Otherwise who would dare
invest in an industry which might suddenly be shut down on a protest whim, or
on the grounds of "public morality"?
It is not surprising that its
practitioners are willing to get out of the trade if they can without ruining
themselves, but it would be quite wrong to outlaw them as though to do so had
been the result of serious investigation and thorough argumentation.
This is the heart of the problem.
Proper compensation offered to fur farmers would carry the implication that the
government accepted that the farmers had been the innocent victim of arbitrary
parliamentary sanction which was not based on any very large or legitimate
principle. And yet anyone proposing a ban on fur-farming would like to be
arguing that it was just, right, obvious, and clear that the practice was not
merely unpopular, but actually wrong, and more wrong than any similar practices
which had not been banned. Presumably, anyone discriminated against without
compensation could go before a European forum and claim that his human rights
had been violated. There, the disparity of view between, say, Denmark and
Britain would be rather clear.
A right wing, free market view would probably suggest that
from the farmers' point of view, it would only be fair to compensate them well
for being discriminated against. And a right wing taxpayer would then be nudged towards the view that it could hardly
be right to introduce legislation which was so unfair that it required
compensation of its victims to make it morally acceptable. The right-winger
would probably suppose that sooner than pay compensation, Parliament should ask
itself very seriously why it wanted to introduce a very selective ban on just
one use of animals.
More generally, and culturally, it is a curious society
which has no interest in condemning the kinds of actions which stop willing
customers buying from willing sellers in a legal and policed trade committed to
reform. It is an odder one still which does not notice that something has been
lost to freedom as well as to the market when it refuses to condemn protest
which is vicious. But it is something worse if it turns out that Parliament is
prepared to pander to populism and to protest. It has a longer and better
tradition of trying to see where the balance of right and wrong lies, where the
evidence points, and how to assess the competing rights of interest groups.
Having done so, it has usually recognised that emerging principles and ideals
need to be applied fairly.
If new sensitivities emerge, and new principles are
promulgated, people have a right to see them applied consistently: that is what
it means to have equality before the law. That is, if a ban is good for the
goose, it is good for gander too. On such elementary principles can we see that
only ill-considered idealism would stigmatise, let alone outlaw, the fur trade
and its customers. Public morality is offended by such a ban, with or without
compensation for its victims.
[[[[Ends
main text
Appendices
follow and then references]]]]]]]
Appendix 1
Extracts
from a conversation with one of Denmark's most senior mink husbandry academic
researchers, Professor Lief Lau Jeppesen, of the Zoological Institute,
University of Copenhagen.
On the comparison of mink and other farmed animals
Compared with other farm
animals we have these mink in the wild, and that makes a difference. Researchers
can study mink and foxes in the wild, so it's easier to consider them. They
really are not the same as their domestic equivalents. We know that
domestication takes place very fast at the beginning. There are changes in
behaviour, primarily, and that's very fast because those that don't reproduce
are heavily selected against from the very the beginning.
But we have scientific
argument which shows that the brains of farmed mink are smaller than those of
wild mink. That's the case in all farm animal species and in mink it is reduced
to almost the same extent as the other domesticated species compared with their
wild cousins... they are calmer and they are less easy to stress. Maybe they
are also more stupid.
There's a difference and we
see it in all domestic species, in cats and dogs for instance. I don't know the
reason or function of the difference in brain size, but I think it favours the
species. I simply want to use it favour of saying there a certain degree of
domestication.
It is cruelty to keep wild
mink under the same conditions as farmed mink and it's simply not allowed.
I think it's very important
to compare mink with other domesticated species, for instance, dogs, cats and
cattle. They are all able to survive in the wild given the right conditions.
Domesticated pigs have been released to pig parks for study reasons and they
survive very well - the pigs need the right food and they are restricted when
they are set free because in most places you have to feed them for a while, but
if there aren't too many of them they can survive quite well in woods. Battery
hens can live in the wild. The same holds for cattle: when you release them for
grazing, they take care of themselves all summer. And they are indeed rather
wild and difficult to handle when you capture them in the autumn.
I agree that the conditions
for farmed mink are better than the conditions for intensively kept pigs and
chicken, though you can't in a scientific way compare the two. I have seen them
both.
It's not hard to see the
difference. You can compare the way you keep mink. It allows one individual to
survive and reproduce in the same sort of environment for life. They live for
several years and for much longer than they are able to survive in the wild.
That isn't true of the pig. The breeding pig is kept in better conditions than
the pig kept only for food. But all mink are kept in the same environment, one
which allows breeding. They are allowed the same standard whether for breeding
or fur production.
On weaning
Weaning is at 7-8 weeks
usually, but it's very important to understand the way they are weaned then.
The mother is removed and it's a good time to remove her because if it was
delayed she would be very exhausted. Then all her pups are kept all together
for another 2-3 weeks, and then kept in pairs. It's very bad for the animals to
keep them singly from an early age, and that's true for most species of
developed mammals.
The production mink, at 10 or
11 weeks old [in the summer] has got another 3-4 months to live [until slaughter
in the late autumn]. It needs warmth and comfort early on. In the wild it wants
food and in the spring time it wants to mate. If we compare pigs, fattening
pigs are removed at 4 weeks of age, which is much earlier than in the wild and
relatively and relatively it's much earlier than happens to mink in farms.
In wild mink the young start
feeding solid food at 5-6-8 weeks and that's when mother brings solid food to
the den, so it's gradual. At 10-11 weeks you see kits alone outside the nest
without their mothers and so it seems that the weaning process on farms is
nearer to the wild situation as compared with sows or pigs. If we compare breeding pigs, the sow is mated
again one week after the weaning and so it's much harder working compared to
the wild. In the wild, sows might have two litters a years but on a farm they
are often forced to deliver many times a year.
It's very difficult to know
about specific needs in farm animals. They need food shelter and to mate. In
the wild, the mink is a solitary species. When they are solitary in the wild
they need big territories to find food and for that reason maybe they are not
that hostile when they have plenty of food. We are experimenting with group
housing, to see what is the ideal number of animals per group for a given cage
size.
My experiments show that they
benefit from being together, but not for all of the Autumn, for instance. It
seems to be an advantage that the litter is kept all together in right amount
of space up until August or September but after that they are more aggressive
towards each other. So after that, they should be in pairs, and we are
examining putting them in pairs then. But not if they are they are adult and
unknown to each other.
When it comes to group
management, an average litter has five young. We tried to keep them and their
mother, six animals, together in three normal cages, which is the same stocking
density as keeping them in pairs. The advantage is that each animal has more
freedom of movement, and it seems as if they develop less stereotypies as
adults. But during the Autumn you can't see the difference.
You see stereotypies in the
animals that go on to breed. Stereotypy is an adult characteristic in mink at
least. You hardly see it in the production animals. It's seen for the first
time in November and it's significant only in January or February, and then
when they are preoccupied with breeding [in the Spring] it falls again.
Domestic cat gets restless
before it's fed, and I agree that this could be an explanation for a lot of
stereotypy, that it is just excitement which has to be expressed in a
relatively little area. I think that the physical limitation on the behaviour
looks like stereotypy, and it's hard to see whether it is actually psychotic.
It's very difficult to say
that an unhappy mink will show stereotypy. I think there's too much emphasis on
stereotypy as a measure. In all other respects they thrive, reproduce and the
level of basic stress hormones is quite normal and they are not afraid of
humans, at least not to an extent to stress them. But they have this smaller
question of performing stereotypy behaviour or behaviour which looks like
stereotypy.
It is possible to reduce the
occurrence of stereotypy, mainly by feeding more frequently in January and
February. There are two reasons. One is that at that time animals have less to
do and they are alone. And the other reason is that they get slightly less feed
than they would prefer and that has to do with farmers wanting to feed them as
much as possible around pelting. But later on when they are used as breeding
animals they should be less fat and so they get less food than they want. So
you can reduce it by letting them feeding them more frequently.
On measuring distress and stress
We are not near knowing
whether a creature is happy or unhappy just by measuring hormone. The answer to
any welfare question is to look at many measures.
We know for sure that when
animals are acutely stressed - scared - there is an increase in stress hormones
so it's very easy to measure acute stress. But then you have to consider the
circumstance, the context of the rise in stress hormones, because they rise
when you perform mating behaviour or eat or badly stressed, because they
prepare the body for violent action, so the acute hormone is not much use in
the welfare discussion.
But the signs of welfare
problems are long term stress, which shows as
raised cortisone and cortisol levels,
which are a pair of the hormones involved. If the base levels of these
are permanently raised they are indicative of a difficult situation. The base
level is the level in the blood stream, it's the mean level, but for stress
hormones its not quite fair to talk about base levels. These hormones are
excreted in episodes ever half hour or hour and it's not regular. But it
maintains a certain level in the blood which is the base level, and then, when
you are stressed, there is a three or four fold increase, but the base level
may be raised by 50 per cent, as measured as an average across time.
I think you can say that the
cortisol levels are indicative of poor condition. It is raised in all
situations where we expect animals not to fare well and it has causal
consequences for all the life process. It begins in a bad effect and it
produces a bad effect. Stressed animals are prepared for violent action all the
time, they draw on their reserves of food and fat and the blood is filled with
free fatty acids and blood sugar and they break down food stuffs and reserves
all the time and they spend a lot more energy in being in the situation of
preparedness. Blood is moved to muscles and brain and away from digestion and
that's why they lose weight in this situation.
But animals can show
stereotypy without showing these stress signs. If it's real psychotic
behaviour, it is a means of coping and a means of doing something that
regulates the stress hormones downwards. So animals showing stereotypy often
show the lowest base levels of stress hormones and that's why you can't
evaluate these measure out of context.
If there are problems in
animals, they have problems with breeding optimally, and that's in part due to
the causal relationship between stress hormones and reproductive hormones. The
reproductive hormones are reduced when there's a lot of stress hormone. There's
an active inhibition and that may be evolutionarily adaptive, because there's
no point starting
breeding in very stressful
environments.
On needs, for instance, swimming and occupation
Mink certainly need food and
drinking water, and mating, they also maybe need activity because they are
adapted to being swift, active, opportunistic hunters. So it's fair to imagine
that they are adapted to being adaptive and to having something to manage in
elements of their lives, and that could be a specific need which we have to
fulfil and which is not fulfilled for the time being, these animals certainly
have a need for a den, for somewhere to hide, and you can easily show that if
you close the next box then they develop all the signs of long term stress and
really demonstrate bad welfare. But I don't think swimming is a need in this
species and that's because they do not need to swim to maintain their life
functions.
Chicken or hens, they have a
need for dust-bathing, and we know that for sure and it's quite natural. They
have to do that dust-bathing to keep their feathers in good condition in the
wild and the most easy way for natural selection to take care of that is to put
into the animals an internal need for that behaviour. But chickens can keep the feathers in good
condition without dust-bathing, but there remains a need to perform the motions
of dust-bathing and you can compare it with the need for food.
In the wild mink, live close
to water and at some times of the year they get
most of their food from water. But in periods in which there are plenty
of voles or young rabbits, they can feed on the terrestrial animals and then
they never go to the water. So they have no daily need to go to water for
instance.
Then we have the Oxford work
which has shown that mink will lift heavy burdens to get to water and here I
think we are dealing not with a specific need but a need to be active and to do
something and that means it isn't necessary for us to provide water but to
provide some sort of occupation.
We might make mink work for
food. They do learn easily, and that's a possible way to make their lives more
interesting - but it's not without limit. In the wild, they take large meals
and long periods in the den.
We know having a lot of straw
is good occupation: they make new nests.
We are talking about need and
occupation, and the best environmental enrichment is another mink. That's the
best dynamic enrichment and they thrive very well in pairs. But whether housing
in bigger groups helps the animals or the politicians, I'm not so sure.
The difficulty with making
feeding more interesting is that it probably needs dry feed, and wet feed is
much better for the mink. Similarly, providing water is difficult because it
brings disease problems as well as expense.
On carbon dioxide
I think the Oxford work on
carbon dioxide is right: mink can smell it and they dislike it, but they have
to be killed anyway and it's very difficult to imagine an affordable method
which is better than carbon dioxide. They are killed fast and with no pain and
there's a difference between pain and dislike. They realise that something is
wrong but don't know what is wrong, and it's not actually hurting them. Carbon
monoxide really kills you without notice, you can't smell it. But we don't use
it with mink because you don't want that huge amount of carbon monoxide around:
it's too good a killer.
Appendix
2
A note and extracts of a conversation with an
international negotiator on humane trapping standards.
Neal
Jotham is a lifelong animal welfare worker. Volunteer with Canadian Association
for Humane Trapping, 14 years; Executive Director, Canadian Federation of
Humane Societies, 8 years; former co-ordinator, Humane Trapping Program,
Department of Environment, 14 years; member of the Canadian delegation to the
negotiations of the Agreement on International Humane Trapping Standards,
chairman of the ISO, the International Organisation for Standardisation's
Technical Committee on Animal (Mammal) Traps.
A Note On the Agreement Upon International
Humane Trapping Standards
By
Neal Jotham
Commencing
in 1987, starting with 7 countries, through to 1994, with 15 countries, an ISO
Technical Committee (191) worked to develop international humane trapping
standards that would have included allowable trap performance thresholds. This work happened to coincide with one of
the conditions set out in a 1994 EU regulation that prohibits importation of
products derived from 12 North American wild fur-bearers unless:
1) an exporting country prohibited the use
of the leghold trap
OR
2) the trapping methods used for the
species listed in the regulation meet internationally agreed humane trapping
standards.
The
ISO TC 191 process was underway long before the EU fur ban regulation was being
contemplated and several European animal protection organisations were invited
to join those deliberations, but initially refused the invitation. When, in 1992, EU officials were
contemplating the drafting of the regulation, they recognised that a fur ban
regulation could very well contravene the rules of the WTO. They were also informed that simply banning a
particular trapping device would not improve animal welfare (a supposed
intention of the regulation) if indeed trapping would continue and use any
methods at all so long as they did not include leghold traps.
The
answer was to take into account the ISO trap standards-setting process and
since the 1994 regulation was to come into effect in 1996, thereby giving time
for the ISO standards to be completed, the officials included condition 2 in
the regulation.
Animal
protection organisations who were vehemently opposed to the fur trade,
regardless of how humane it is, contemplated, what for them was a loophole in
the regulation (the aspect of humane trapping standards) and considered that it
could potentially allow the wild fur trade to continue in Europe. Consequently, in 1994 they embraced the ISO
process and did everything possible to undermine the work that had been
completed even though a major stated objective for any ISO standard setting
process is "to facilitate trade"
These
groups demanded that the term 'humane' be removed from the ISO trap standards
on grounds that the start-up, trap performance thresholds were unacceptable to
be used in the context of their meaning of the term - requiring killing traps
to effect instant death and restraining traps to cause no injury.
The
difficulty was not in removing the term 'humane' from the ISO Standards,
(improved animal welfare related to trapping was still being addressed through
the performance thresholds), but rather in removing it in the context of its
use in addressing condition 2 of the EU fur ban regulation. An EU Commission official made the situation
more contentious by informing the ISO TC 191 meeting that "if the term
'humane' is removed from the international standard, the standard could not be
used as a condition for allowing the importation of wild fur products into EU
countries".
Ultimately,
by 1996 consensus could not be reached for an ISO trap standard that contained
performance thresholds and the work turned toward the development of ISO
Standards for "Trap Testing Methodologies". This effort has culminated in the successful
publication of those Standards in August 1999.
This is not a minor conclusion to what became long and volatile
deliberations. A major difficulty
experienced, throughout the ISO TC 191 work, was the lack of comparable trap
research and testing data. These new ISO Standards, when applied by any country
for determining trap performance, are designed eliminate that controversy. This is extremely important in the context of
the Agreement on International Humane Trapping Standards.
In
1995, in the absence of ISO Standards that included the term 'humane' and trap
performance thresholds as well as consideration of the fact that a challenge
under the WTO rules would not be constructive and should be avoided if at all
possible, Canada, the EU, Russia and the USA decided to attempt to negotiate,
on a government to government basis, the development of international humane
trapping standards. This effort was
successful with the signing of the Agreement on International Humane Trapping
Standards in December 1997, by Canada, the EU and Russia and a slightly
different one between EU and the United States.
Neal Jotham: remarks from a
conversation…
Now
we have to test the traps according to a standard, which is what we were
working for before - we have now negotiated politically an agreement which is a
standard to replace the ISO standard in which we've got performance
requirements. The animal rights people don't like those performance
requirements. They've tried desperately to stop this Agreement - but there it
is, there it sits.
We
have to deliver, absolutely, and we've got various time frames, between five
and eight years to do the job and bring in legislation and to ban traps that
don't meet the standards. And we're doing marvellously, I'm very pleased to
say. Canada is really moving along. We're co-operating with the United States -
because trapping is carried out closer to more urban areas they need to
use more restraining systems that they
will have to test than what we do. They're willing to accept the sort of things
that we're doing with killing traps and we're working with them on restraining
traps.
We
believe that leghold traps of some kind for some species will meet the
standards. We have said we want to be able to retain some sort of legholding
traps for wolf, coyote, lynx, bobcat and for raccoon in some trapping
conditions in Canada. In the United States there's more species. I would add
only red fox, bear and perhaps arctic fox in Canada although they're not on the
list at the moment.
The
negotiations about 'humane' trapping standards were made difficult because even
a humane killing trap doesn't deliver an instant kill all the time. Depending
on the species, it can have levels of killing performance in the range of 180
or 200 seconds for some species in some circumstances. But the animal rights people said absolutely
no, the only way you can use the word humane, was if it delivered an instant
kill; or if it's a holding type trap, there should be no injury. That is a
total impossibility and it can't be done here in Europe and it's not done here
in Europe. So you're looking at gradual, realistic change within an industry
where you are working out in the wilderness, in the bush, in rivers and under
the ice, etc. where you do not the conditions you have in a slaughterhouse
where you have virtually total control or in a laboratory where you have got
laboratory rats under your control. So now, you have to be realistic and say
OK, what can do we do in such a situation when trapping will continue for many
reasons ?
Canada,
the United States and Russia and others asked the EU Commission what are you
doing about trapping in Europe, how do your traps perform? You have banned the leghold trap for whatever
your reasons, saying it's terrible.
Fine, so have we, for a number of species. But five or six blocks from
the European parliament in Brussels we walked down to a hardware store and
asked the clerk, do you have anything that can be used to catch foxes? Do you have traps?" The clerk brought
out a leghold trap with teeth in it, and sold it to us. [Such a trap is wholly
illegal in Canada - RDN]
What
we're asked to do by the Agreement is to achieve a killing time of between 45
seconds for ermine, 120 seconds for marten and for the larger animals such as
raccoon and beaver up to 300 seconds with the caveat of trying to lower those
as best we can over the years with research and testing. That's what is set out
in the Agreement on International Humane Trapping Standards. We've directed our
whole trap research and testing programme towards addressing the circumstances
in that agreement.
On the leghold trap or any type of
restraining device
The
Agreement requires that the conventional steel-jawed leghold restraining trap
be prohibited in Canada by April 2001 for 5 of the listed species. It has
already been prohibited for 7 of the listed species. However, as I said previously there will
likely be some type of legholding traps for several species that will meet the
standards.
The
holding of a wild animal in any type of restraining device is likely going to
cause it some difficulty and stress simply because it's being held in a place
it doesn't want to be. Most of the wild predator animals that are trapped have
a tremendous ability for adapting to a stressful event as a built-in survival
mechanism and when traps are set by the professional trapper in a way that
allows them to get under cover, struggling against the trap is minimised and
therefore injuries are minimised.
The
point is that all restraining traps used for whatever reason to capture the
species listed in the Agreement will have to comply with the Standards set out
in it and those that do not meet the Standards prohibited by 2007. For restraining traps they will have to
demonstrate that none of a list of specific injuries occurs in 80% of a sample
of 20 animals caught in such traps. Believe
me the Standard is tough.
Yes,
the leghold trap with teeth was banned years ago in Canada and the USA and yet in Brussels we could buy what is
referred to as the old English gin trap.
The old leghold trap with teeth hardly needed to be banned in Canada
because it simply just fell out of use. Why?
Because they cut the animal up and it struggled excessively usually
causing damage to its pelt. Furthermore
if an animal broke some bones allowing it to twist out of the trap it's gone,
so that's not very economical for a trapper.
Any rate the whole issue of leghold traps was obviously more a political move than a
true concern for animal welfare The animal rights/anti-fur people thought, if
they could force a ban on the leghold trap then there would be a dent in the
trade. If Canada had simply just taken a political step and said we're banning
all leghold traps it wouldn't have stopped trapping. But the systems and
devices used may have been more cruel or more inhumane.
Implementation
of the Agreement ensures that traps will meet a Standard that improves the
welfare of animals regardless of the reason they are trapped.
On the Killing Trap (Submersion
Systems)
In
Canada beaver and muskrat, otter, mink, are semi-aquatic species which can be
taken in an underwater circumstance where they will be killed either by a
killing trap itself or very quickly through carbon dioxide narcosis in a
holding trap. People identify this with a human drowning, but actually it's
asphyxiation. The reason is this: a semi-aquatic species such as beaver caught
in a trap properly set will automatically dive under water because it has been
frightened. It can survive under water for 15-odd minutes so it is not starting
to die the moment it goes under water. That's the same for a human only humans
can't stay under so long. In the case of the beaver, its heart slows down, it
never opens its oesophagus, it has the ability to shunt blood from the outer
tissues of its body to the brain for a period of time. Automatically the heart
slows down as soon as it dives, so it has the ability to live underwater, until
if it's under there long enough an internal exchange takes place of
carbon
dioxide for the oxygen. The blood finally runs out of oxygen and none gets to
the brain and carbon dioxide replaces the oxygen and so it dies. It's a death
not unlike what happens when people kill animals in animal rescue shelters
using a gas method, or when carbon dioxide is used in killing laboratory rats
for example.
On the killing trap used on land
The
effect of banning steel-jawed leghold traps on land wasn't a great hardship
because the trappers themselves had been changing without any push from
anywhere and other traps were coming available. A new killing type trap came
forward in the early 60s It's called
the Conibear trap . The reason it's so good is that it can replace the leghold
trap as one of the most efficient devices for capturing a large number of
species in a variety of trapping situations. That had been one of the major
obstacles to making change - how do you get devices that are as efficient for
the trapper as the leghold and can be set in so many various places? So, once
that became resolved things started to change and it was quite remarkable.
Killing
traps will work on land, for capturing beaver muskrat, the martens, fisher,
raccoon, squirrels, all the sort of terrestrial species up to a certain size,
raccoon and beaver size being probably a good break off. With coyote, first of
all you have to think it's about twice or maybe three bigger than a fox - just
imagine the size of trap that you might have to have.
On welfare backfire
Of
course, in trapping you want to kill every animal instantly, but let me give
you an example of the kind of foolish thinking that goes on sometimes. In Massachusetts in the US, the animal rights
people were successful to have the State virtually ban the use of traps for
even control purposes. Never mind just for trade, for fur: you can't use traps
to take animals unless you can prove
absolutely
there is a need to have this animal killed or whatever. Well, now they're
suddenly experiencing problems with the population growth of beaver and rural
people and people that have cottages and so forth are starting to complain to
the government. They are saying, my god the beavers are down the rivers and
they've built dams and they're flooding my property I've got to get rid of
them. Who can I turn to? And the government wildlife
people,
say, sorry but there's no way we can do anything unless you can prove
absolutely the damage is being done and if so all you can do is go out there
and capture them with live traps of some sort. You will then take them and you
can shoot them or give them an overdose of barbiturate or something.
So
let's explore the animal welfare aspect of this. The trapper could go out, take the animal,
kill it within 180 seconds, probably less. Instead, people have to capture this
thing which means it's going to be held in the range of 4-6 hours, because it
will likely be caught at night, and the guy comes around in the morning and
then they've got to take it some place, unless they have a veterinarian with
them, and have it shot or injected. Now where's the welfare aspect in that? It
almost borders on what the philosopher George Santyana defines as fanaticism.
That is, it's "redoubling your effort when you've forgotten your aim"
.
Of
course, they meant well. Fine. But wait a minute, just because
you
hate trapping, or you hate the fur trade so much and if that is your aim, to
stop somehow the fur trade, then what does it matter about animal welfare - it
doesn't mean anything.
On the need for trapping
There
are something in the range of 80,000 trappers operating in Canada in a given
year - a great many of whom are native people. In a lot of cases they have no
other opportunities and it provides a very substantial part of their annual
income. What does this mean? If you look at the price of the pelts, and the
number they took, they got $400-500 dollars a year. So people might say, that's
chicken feed - tell them to do something else, train them on something else.
Well that is typically not going to happen in those kinds of communities in the
North.
When
we have a lowering in prices, some of the more southerly trappers will say
"I'm not going to go out and trap - I was actually using trapping to
supplement my income because I needed to, I work in the local mill, but I'm not
going this year because the price of the pelt of a beaver is $7 instead of $20
- it cost me $5 to get the thing in the first place with my equipment" and
so on and so forth. So he doesn't go. But the interesting thing is in some of
the more northerly native communities the numbers of trappers will almost
remain constant because they have to go - they need the two dollars, and that
also applies for many non-natives as well.
Appendix 3
Conversations
with three north American trappers and official conservationists
1) Sandy, 76, trapper and veteran, from Cross
Lake, Manitoba, Canada
When we heard that our country was at war, we
wanted to fight for the mother country, for England and for freedom. So I
joined up, and we trained 6 months here in Canada and then for two years in
England. We were in the front line at Normandy and then during the rest of the
war, in Germany. We wanted to fight for freedom and for the freedom to use the
animals and land which God had given us to use. It is not right to neglect the
animals which God has put there for our use.
2) Alan McCloud, trapper, Cross Lake, Manitoba,
Canada
People who trap find they can be proud to be an
Indian. When you're out on the land it gives you an awareness of the land and
your responsibilities. You can't afford to make a mistake. No, you can't really
make a living at it. You can offset some of the expenses, put money towards a skidoo,
toward the high prices at the store, etc. We have power dams here which are a
hundred times more damaging than trapping and cause much more suffering when
they flood the animals' homes. My mum and Dad didn't give up trapping until
they died and when I was young there were eight of us kids and we all went
trapping, there wasn't anything else. Between eight and 16 that was all we
did. I go trapping now because it's in
my blood. A very small minority of the young will go out trapping now compared
with 20 years ago. I'm 57 [in 1996], and
nowadays there's better education and more opportunity for working at different
things.
On welfare
There should be more purpose to it, they should
work for welfare which they're able to do.
I defend trapping because you're doing something, by learning that you
have responsibility for yourself and for your self-esteem.
A small minority of mink suffer, if they're
trapped in warm weather, on land. Near water, they're caught in a leghold trap
and the animal drowns in the water and doesn't suffer. In cold weather, in open
country, they die of cold.
3) Bob Carmichael, conservation official with Manitoba
State, Canada, working on fur issues from 1973
Without any doubt it was a sense of wonder which propelled
me to the area. It was seeing flights of duck in October against an autumn moon
and seeing otter playing in the creek.
I feel very good about trapping. When you look at the wider
picture of what trapping achieves.
Trapping isn't eternally right or eternally wrong. It saves provincial
treasuries millions of dollars a year from animal damage. [And granted the
natural risk of accident and the probability of a nasty death in nature] I know
if trapping stopped we would be increasing the net amount of suffering to
animals. I believe very strongly that the net effect of buying a fur coat is to
decrease animal suffering and to contribute to human wellbeing.
I have seen animals trapped wrongly and they suffer
horribly.
It just bothers me intensely when just a small minority of people,
people with big egos and fat wallets, succeed in selling a whole notion which
simply isn't true. The animal rights people have very successfully made the
Government the Goliath to their David and they are much cleverer than us in
dealing with the media and wrapping a red ribbon round their package.
4) Noel Kinlear, conservation official with the
State of Louisiana, USA
[Farmed] nutria escaped from a pen during a
hurricane, and because they were thought to be helpful against the invasion of
water hyacinth people caught them and took them to their own parts and by 1953
they were everywhere. Perhaps there were 20 million in Louisiana, and damaging
sugar cane and rice production quite severely. By 1955 the problem was severe
enough to warrant their being listed as "Outlaw" species and a 25
cent bounty was placed on their heads, but this was never paid because funds
were never made available. There was market in the early 60s: pelt prices
created demand and more nutria were harvested than muskrat for the first time.
But then there was a fashion shift from long hair fur to short hair, especially
in the main market, Germany, and by mid to late 80s it fell continuously until
in 1985 only about 150,000-250,000 were taken annually. Below a cull of about
500,000 they begin to notice more damage.
Louisiana has 40 per cent of the US coastal
wetland and they are depended upon for hundreds of species, including wading
birds, gulls, terns, and then in the water there's oyster, blue crab, vital
economic fisheries, alligators. And northern water fowl winter here, so there's
damage to these species we love to see and need to see.
In the open country you can shoot, but the
majority of the acreage here is swamplands, or where there's rank vegetation,
so you can't ride through them and see nutria to shoot them.
Our strategy as the agency which manages wildlife is to try to get the
economic value of nutria pelt and the meat up so that we don't have to force
the taxpayer to cover the cull with their money.
Appendix 4
Fur production
The
following figures are based on fur auction house returns
1) World mink production - volatile
in price and quantity, but thriving
Year/million
pelts/some exceptional price years
80
22
81
23.3
82
26.2
83
27.9
84
29.9
85
32.6 - high
86
33.8
87
35.7 - very high, all time peak
88
41.7 - price weakening
89
38.5
90
27.1
91
26.1
92
26.4 - low
93
20.4 - all time low
94
22.6
95
25.7
96
24.6 - very high; Russia and China boom
97
26.3
98
- weakened on Russia's economic
chaos
99
- recovering
2 Some observations
In
1997 Danish mink production was about 45 per cent of total and four times
greater than its next competitor, the USA. In 1998 Denmark was still the
largest single producer, with production twice that of its nearest rival, Russia.
In
1995, Russian production was 4.8m; in 1996, 3m; and in 1997, 2m
Danish
production was 12.7 in 1988; 14 million in 1989; 10.8 in 1997 and 8.1 in 1998
In
1988, Scandinavian production was 19.5m (of which Denmark was 12.7m);USA 4.5m;
Russia, 5m; Canada 1.3m; China, 5m; Holland 1.8m
In
1997, Scandinavian production was 14.8m (of which Denmark was 10.8m); USA 2.7m;
Russia, 2m; Canada less than 1m; China less than 1m; Holland 0.8. England 100g,
Ireland 160g, France 100g.
[[[[Ends
appendices, follows references]]]]
References
and appendices for fur book 3.9.99
References
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Ends
1 The BFTA
notes: It seems to have been the RSPCA which initiated the Bill when it wrote
to MPs in October 1998 urging a Private Members Bill on fur farming. The report said that is was opposed to
“farming and trapping of (wild) animals for their fur”. In its report, the RSPCA offered the services
of its Parliamentary Department to MPs.
It said that the RSPCA has a large national press office, as well as
regional press officers, who would ensure that “your message is effectively
transmitted to the public…(RSPCA) has enormous experience in synchronising
advertising campaigns, prompting letter writing campaigns and (will) ensure
that every aspect of your campaign is co-ordinated.”
[2] The Eagle Bill as proposed: complete
extinction of fur farms in the
[3] See Appendix 4
[4] see Appendix 4
[5] I have seen letters written
by Harrods' management insisting that its fur business was profitable, but that
protest against it brought intolerable pressure on the store. This is quite at
odds with Harrods' public stance that it would never give into pressure.
[6] PETA claimed the video
showed conditions on a fox farm in Illinois – in fact the farmer named was not
a fur farmer at all, but a scent farmer – the animals shown on the video,
including racoons, were all taken from the wild, whereas foxes farmed in US are
from breeding stock going back more than 70 generations. Another pointer is
that racoons are not farmed their fur and yet the video clearly showed racoons
in cages. Finn racoons are farmed in
[7] Telephone conversations and
meeting with Knud Erik Heller, Associate
Professor, Zoological Institute, University of Copenhagen, 1996-1999
[8] Letter from BFTA to MAFF,
[9] Telephone conversation,
1999
[10] Private note, but see Scruton, 1996
[11] Jan Elnif, associate professor of fur animal science,
department of animal science and health, royal veterinary and agricultural
university,
[12] EU and
[13] The British Fur Trade Association adds:
"International Fur Trade Federation statistics show that 90% of all
animals trapped in the wild each year are not trapped directly for fur but for
other purposes such as wildlife conservation, pest control, etc. mostly in