Are you chastising fur-wearers or just not buying fur for yourself? I’m an omnivore who often wears leather shoes & carries leather purses. But I think fur is icky. I realize this is not a good argument–but I’m just expressing my own feelings, not telling somebody else what to do.
Partly, this may be because I live in Houston, where we don’t have hard winters. And I don’t have a place in Aspen. Down here, furs are worn by ladies on their second facelift & third marriage. If I had money to blow, Tiffany* would get it–not Fendi.
But I won’t chastise fur-wearers of the frozen North. In fact, I’ll probably not see them in their furs; I’ll go visiting up there when Houston is steamy.
And I feel for the possum hunters in NZ. Possums are native here but I hate the little critters…
As far as we know, “suffering is just a negative stimulus” even in humans. So what if we are “intelligent”? If there is no soul, and we are just meat robots, then all that means is that the “negative stimulus” is more complex than in other species, but it is nothing more than that. An electrical impulse travels from the spot were your skin is cut to your brain, and the state of your brain changes to a “pain state” from a “non-pain state”.
This is similar in other species, and I assume a monkey, a cow, or a dog will be just as much aware of being put in a “pain state” as we are.
I have some free time and my computer is actually up and running today so I will try to address some of the “fur issues”.
My husband and I have been mink farmers for more than 45 years. We have always made our living from the farm. At present we have 5 full time employees and my husband still works all day every day. We are presently “pelting”, which means we are killing this year’s crop and preparing it for market in the spring of 2009.
Someone from NZ posted that the anti-fur movement destroyed the market for NZ possum pelts and while I disagree that was the likely cause, I won’t argue that too strenuously since I know very little about NZ possum and the fur business there. A friend of ours is currently importing some NZ possum and wool fabric, which I have seen and I think it is a very good product. It is his contention that the NZ possum fur industry is fragmented and that the trappers don’t organize for their own benefit. This is always a problem when we are speaking of wild fur.
There was a worldwide depression in fur prices for a few years – this had nothing to do with the anti-fur movement but had a lot to do with the strength of the American dollar. The fur business is conducted in American dollars whether the sales are in Copenhagen or Toronto or elsewhere.
The anti-fur movement has had no real effect on the market despite the publicity it attracts and the pronouncements from PETA and ALF, etc. The market for fur continues as it always has, the demand remains high and the number of skins sold has increased over the last decades. The 2007 – 2008 selling season brought the highest prices in history for fur of all kinds – largely due, of course, to the weakness of the US dollar in terms of Euros and yen and rubles last season. The biggest buyers for fur are the Chinese. Not so much for domestic consumption, but for manufacture. The Russians and Koreans are also huge markets. (Every Russian wears a fur hat, or so it seems. One large male mink skin makes a fur hat.) Last year somewhere between 40 and 50 million farmed mink skins moved through the system. An exact number is difficult as there were some millions grown in China and they are not properly accounted for – we in the fur business do not really know what became of these skins. What with one thing and another they were believed to be of very low quality.
The 2008 – 2009 selling season has started badly due to the world economic crisis. However, a cold winter in China and Russia will do the market good and we haven’t despaired yet.
The US is not important in the fur business. At one time there were many manufacturers in New York and it was rather a centre of the fur trade; this is no longer true.
My husband has worked for many years with trappers and other fur farmers on animal welfare issues; we know many trappers “up North” in Canada and from Russia and Siberia. Fur farmers are not any more inhumane than any other group of farmers – we are very closely watched and almost all jurisdictions have strict regulations, so I think we might be more concerned with animal welfare than some others. Mink farmers in Canada and the US generally use the waste products of the fisheries and meat processors as feed.
The fur business is a very old one, and it is very interesting. I’d be glad to answer questions, although it might take me awhile.
Thanks for the info, vison.
How are your minks killed?
What age are they when they’re killed?
Can you describe their lives – pens? cages? separate, or in groups? do they fight each other?
Do they get loose a lot? (I ask because I hear ferrets are the champions at getting into and out of whatever you don’t want them into or out of.)
I’d imagine mink poop is pretty potent since they eat meat. How do you clean up after 'em? Do you have to deal with runoff like hog or cattle farms sometimes do?
What do you do with the carcasses after pelting?
In an effort to fight ignorance, I’d like to offer some information I recently learned about trapping. This was an issue where I work and we had several representatives of trapping groups come and do some demonstrations. Studies have shown that shooting an animal frequently results in more pain and trauma than traps. Perhaps we have a trapper here who can answer questions. In the mean-time, here’s a link to a website showing studies on best management practices for trappers.
Please note: This is information aimed at addressing the myth of the cruel leg-hold trap. There are may be many valid reasons for opposing sport hunting or trapping–but this is not necessarily one of them.
I can’t speak for Vox but I believe what he is saying is that suffering is different in lower animals than humans simply because the lower animals generally don’t understand things like future, “could be”, and other things that define being able to live other than just in the present. So, things that humans would perceive as negative, such as standing about in a feed lot, would not be negative to a cow. Cows are extremely simple creatures so as long as they are fed, watered, more or less sheltered and not scared, they are the cow equivalent of happy.
Even pain itself is perceived differently in different animals, due to things like underdeveloped nervous systems and thicker skin. For example, one can take dewclaws off of a two day old puppy without pain because their nervous systems are so primitive at that age. People who think it is cruel to remove dewclaws from baby puppies simply don’t know what they are talking about and are generally looking at it from a human standpoint.
So, what I think Vox is saying is that different animals have different levels of negative stimulus that will actually cause suffering and/or pain. Attempting to decide if an animal is suffering or feeling pain based on human experience will generally give false answers.
At the end of the day, any feeling/thought you have (pain, thoughts about the future, etc) are just different states of the matter contained in your scull.
Why are the states of the matter within our scull more valuable than the states of matter within the sculls of other animals?
Look, of course in everyday life we do value human life more, but to draw a clear line between us and every other animal is wrong. It has no scientific or logical basis. There is much more of a gray area, many more shades of gray when seeing if causing pain is acceptable to us on the one hand and other animals on the other.
I don’t think this is what Vox was saying. I think he was saying that pain in a “non-intelligent” animal is just a stimulus, just an error signal, like the error signal that a computer might process if the hard disk has some issues. He is totally disallowing any possible problem with causing any amount of pain to animals.
Boy, I do hope Running with Scissors’s very cool thread doesn’t get derailed into a debate about whether or not animals have souls and if so what they’re worth.
Our year: in March the mink are bred. As is the case for many animals, their reproductive cycle is triggered by the increase in daylight hours in the spring. We keep one male for about every 5 females and our farm, which is small, will carry about 2500 females. Each female is provided with a wooden nesting box and plenty of clean straw for bedding, the wire cage bottoms are covered with temporary wooden floorboards. The kitts are born beginning at the end of April, by May 6 or 7 most of those females that are going to whelp have whelped. The kitts are tiny when they are born, weighing no more than 10 grams, about the size of my little finger. They are hairless, and blind. Not particularly pretty, but appealing as most newborns are. We expect to average about 5 kitts per female kept, but litter sizes vary from 1 to 16, with litters of 6, 7, and 8 being the most common. By 21 days they ought to weigh at least 120 gm.
The kitts are weaned at about 6 weeks of age, vaccinated at about 10-12 weeks of age, separated into pairs over the summer and throughout the fall are placed one to a pen if the farmer has enough pens, we keep many 2 to a pen, always littermates. Mink will fight each other, the males are very fierce at breeding time. But mink brought up together get along well. You can introduce strange kitts to a litter up to about 8 weeks of age.
They are full grown by December, at about 6 months. Most of the mink we are killing now were born at the beginning of May. However, we keep back the breeding stock: any mink we intend to keep is disease tested and graded for quality, and we replace about 1/3 of our breeders each year. The males will run from about 8 pounds up to 11 pounds, the females will be 5 or 6 pounds. The female skins have finer, higher quality fur and lighter-weight leather. Good quality fur coats are generally made from female skins and the males will be used for scarves, hat, stoles, trim, etc., and lower quality coats and jackets.
They are beautiful animals, but they do not make good pets as they do not like to be handled. They bite fiercely, having extremely sharp canine teeth; we wear leather welders’ mitts when handling them. They are carnivores, although we include a cereal proportion in their feed. They are escape artists in one sense, in that some of them work away at a loose connection in the cage wire, etc., but most of them don’t. They are quick when they run, though, and I could never catch one on the ground without the help of our dogs.
We kill ours with CO, we buy bottled gas for that purpose. We do the skinning at home, the rest of the pelting process is done elsewhere. The skins are scraped and dried and sold that way, “raw”. Whoever buys them will have them tanned or as we say in the fur business “dressed”. It’s usually done in China or Korea these days.
The carcasses go to a rendering plant, but some farmers compost them. We don’t, as at our time of life we don’t want to be investing in expensive capital projects and are happy to pay the rendering plant to take the carcasses away. At one time they paid us, but those days are gone forever.
The manure is powerful but is very good fertilizer as it contains a lot of fish. We spread it on our pastures and have enough land to take it all. If we ever had enough spare money to put up a gas plant, we could generate all the electricity and fuel we’d ever need, from the manure, but we’ve never had the spare money. Maybe we should look into government grants! Fur farms in Canada and the US are completely free market, there are no quotas, etc.
We have all “Mahogany” mink right now, a lovely lustrous dark brown that might look black to the uneducated eye. Black mink traditionally bring the highest prices, year in and year out. The “high colours”, such as the blues and greys and pale beiges, occasionally bring high prices but that’s only because they are relatively uncommon. If we all raised them, you wouldn’t be able to give them away.
Does scull = skull? You don’t have a location so I have to ask - do you speak English as a first language? Because, you have totally missed my point. Which was, it tends to take more to create fear/distress/pain in a food animal than in a human, and that applying human feelings to animals tends to be a bad idea.
Again, I wasn’t talking about causing pain, I was talking about what it takes to actually create that pain, and it does have scientific basis. Also, FWIW, I tend to value human life less than most animals…
I rather doubt that. Even if he believed that, I don’t think he would say so in public…
Damn Firefox spell checker (it looks like scull is “an oar used at the stern of a boat to propel it forward with a thwartwise motion”, which is why I was not getting a squiggly line underneath it. I knew it looked weird)
Then why did he say “All suffering is is a negative stimulus, and so it is morally irrelevant in a non-intelligent being”?
He said nothing resembling the point you are trying to make.
ETA: I guess we will need Vox himself to come and clarify exactly what he meant by it.
I would never call you a hypocrite; I would call you illogical.
Mink is raised for the fur, but not the meat? Rhubarb is raised for the stem and not the leaves, and probably for the same reason. Traps are cruel? So is a slaughter house; so is death in the wild.
Clothing can be made of plant fibers and synthetics? The environmental costs of growing fiber plants and making the (non-recyclable) synthetics are enormous.
I have a fur coat (I got it cheap at a yard sale in the late '80s when I had to take public transportation). It’s a fur-lined coat, so it does not make me look rich and glamorous (in fact, it makes me look really fat).
But that coat keeps me warm the two or three days a year I need it, and I am re-using a functional object instead of buying a new and fashionable one.
So you just find the thought of wearing a dead animal’s fur on your body kind of gross? Fine by me. I eat meat, but I don’t hunt and I’ll never dress a deer. Logic isn’t an absolute virtue.
Hypocrite? possibly. But I feel that the feelings of attachment to certain animals and not others is a strictly cultural institution and that i would argue that if it was a truly moral issue it would span cultural borders. Certain people were raised to believe that certain animals are worth save based on certain criteria. Those criteria range from intelligence, endangerment, or just plain cuteness. Establishing benchmarks for those criteria is purely arbitrary, and I don’t think that a definite moral/immoral line can be drawn. It’s hard enough to determine the ethical nature of stealing without delving into this fur debate with all the added parameters.
However, if you agree with me that wearing fur is a cultural institution, then would you then also believe like I do that fur wearers should be able to wear fur, and that non-fur wearers should just not wear fur instead of engaging in million-dollar ad campaigns and lobbying to destroy the other viewpoint? Wouldn’t this also translate to anti-smoking commercials, anti-drug commercials, anti- ANYTHING propaganda?
Actually, there is, as was pointed out in an earlier post: Leather is the secondary use of an animal that is killed primarily for food (in other words, if nobody used the leather it would go to waste). That is the crux of my question. Animals that are killed for fur would not be otherwise killed if nobody used the fur.
And I would venture to guess that in the US (I’ll except Alaska), almost all (new) furs are purchased as fashion statements. Personally, I wear leather as both: shoes, because leather has proven to be the most practical material for that use, and a jacket, because I like the way it looks. Actually, I’ve gone even further than that, since I have a leather living room set, and the seats in my car are made of leather (although I bought it used - given the choice I’d take cloth over leather).
Sure, I could buy shoes made of synthetics, but in my experience they don’t last as long as leather.
And to Vox Imperatoris, haven’t you ever had a pet? Did you ever cause it pain (accidentally)? Are you saying that an animal that feels pain doesn’t “suffer” as we know it?
Um… not always. Rabbits, for example, provide both food and fur. So if the “not used for food” thing is a problem maybe rabbit fur would be more acceptable than some other alternatives.
Also, aren’t some leather goods made from snakes and alligators? I don’t think they are killed for food.
So, Running with Scissors, to have a consistent behavior/worldview, you should be against any fur or leather that was obtained as the primary/sole reason for killing the animal, and you should be OK with any fur or leather that was obtained as a byproduct of killing the animal for some other reasond.
You can’t just have a blanket “fur is bad, leather is good” position.
Actually, some people do eat alligator and snake, with alligator probably being a more commonly eaten meat than snake. I know of at least two butcher shops in my area that will happily sell you alligator for consumption.
Alright, I was going to leave this thread alone to keep it from getting off-topic, but here goes.
I don’t enjoy the suffering of animals; it affects me emotionally, and I wouldn’t want to see an animal in pain. However, there seems to me to be no rational, i.e. supported by logical reasoning, reason to treat the suffering of animals as malum in se. That is, although I believe animals can suffer to varying degrees, this suffering is fundamentally unimportant unless it also negatively affects people.
I’m not necessarily saying I oppose all animal cruelty laws. I don’t particularly like pets, but they can bring enjoyment to people, and I wouldn’t want to see one suffer. For one thing, people that do actually enjoy causing animal suffering tend to be messed up in the head and dangers to other people. Similarly, if exotic endangered species like lions were wiped out, then no one could enjoy watching them in zoos. Even more mundane species’ existence can be important because their disappearance might affect their environment, indirectly hurting humans.
I’m just saying that there is fundamentally no difference between eating the meat (or wearing the fur) of an animal raised in cramped, smelly conditions and eating the meat of an animal raised on a free-range farm, unless it tastes better (and organic products often do). I just don’t see any rational justification for it. Ethical principles are based on the fact that if everyone did it, there would be negative consequences. If everyone were indifferent to animal suffering, there would be no negative consequences; it’s not like the animals would rise against us. If everyone were indifferent to murder, though, then there would be: namely that I would have a much greater chance of being murdered. Religiously, I don’t think animals have souls. Economically, sometimes it is better for humanity that a species gets wiped out rather than have it impede the advancement of society.
Therefore, some fur is good because it is worth more to humanity than having the animals remain alive, and some fur is bad because the animals are more important to humanity in the long run than having the fur now. I don’t see how “waste” of the animal’s meat is an issue here unless someone was going to eat the meat but denied the chance (which would not happen in a free market).
(it looks like