The Grumpy Vegan doesn’t buy The Daily Mail because its politics are rightwing, pandering to narrow-minded British middle class Conservative sensibilities. But, surprisingly, recently, the paper published two excellent full-length pro-animal welfare articles about fur and elephants.
Fur Goodness Sake: Skinned alive for the catwalk by Merrilees Parker explores why “Fur coats are in the middle of a fashion comeback.”
It turns out that she’s a chef who only uses free-range meat and recently made a BBC TV documentary about chicken farming. She wonders if it’s possible to produce “humane” fur. In the tradition of good television, she wears a full-length mink coat on the streets of London but “didn’t attract a single negative reaction” (where’s the ubiquitous PETA activist when you need them?). She goes to a fur farm in Denmark which kills annually 20,000 mink after negotiations with the fur trade. Not surprisingly, she declares it to be the “Hilton of mink farms” and wonders out loud, “If fur farming can be that humane, why has it been outlawed in the UK?”
So, off she goes to Respect for Animals in Nottingham where Mark Glover shows her footage depicting the reality of fur farming, including fox farms in America and China. Merrilees watches horrified, she covers her eyes and cries.
“Could animals spend their time in the wild and then be killed humanely?” she asks.
So, off she goes to Idaho where she’s taught to lay animal traps by Vietnam veteran, Johnnie Wisenhurst. Apparently, there are “good trappers and bad ones” and Johnnie is a good one “taking care not to cause unnecessary suffering to the animals he killed.” (As the Grumpy Vegan doesn’t own a television and never saw the program I will leave you, dear reader, to speculate how she substantiates this claim.)
Nonetheless, after all the research and all the travel, Merrilees, in the tradition of good television has a revelation
Unlike the food industry, where growing public concern has brought about improvements in animal welfare and transparency in labelling products, the people who wear fur don’t seem to give a damn about how it has been produced.
Without pressure from its customers, the fur industry will remain unregulated and, as long as that is the case, anyone buying fur could be supporting animal cruelty. Is any item of clothing really worth that?
For me, the answer is an emphatic no.
After I had finished filming the documentary, one of the first things I did was cut up the fox stole I had worn at my wedding and throw it away.
Sue Reid’s Massacre of the Giants: Once hunted to near extinction, Africa’s elephants slowly pulled back from the brink is a report on the trade in ivory and the plight of Africa’s elephants. It’s an excellent article which rightly takes the British government to task for ending the ban on the sale of ivory. It ends with a bullet point advising readers on how to make a donation to the Born Free Foundation, which I hope the affluent readers of the The Daily Mail immediately did.
Experts at America’s Conservation Biology Centre in Washington DC estimate that 240 tons of ivory are smuggled out of Africa every year – which must mean the deaths of 24,000 of the world’s largest land mammal.
[…]
The decision by CITES to allow the ivory sale to China follows unrelenting pressure from South Africa, Botswana and Namibia – countries where the majority of Africa’s elephants live. They believe they should benefit financially from their elephant herds, and that they deserve to be rewarded for their treasure troves of ivory which have either been confiscated from poachers or collected from carcasses of elephants which died naturally or have been culled since the 1989 ban. On the other hand, other African countries, which have lost almost all their elephants to poachers, are deeply opposed to the trade. While Kenya now has 30,000 elephants, in some of the poorest African countries, elephants can be counted on the fingers of a careless sawmill worker. Senegal, which a decade ago had 20,000, can find only two. In the enormous spaces of Sierra Leone and Liberia, they have just a few hundred apiece. Throughout all of Western Africa there are only 7,500 elephants — a miserable total that is once again falling fast as poaching takes hold.
