No country has ever banned the fur trade, but the Israeli Parliament is about to vote on doing just that. The revolutionary proposed legislation would ban the import, production, and sale of fur.
If the ban passes it will not be the first time Israel has been in the vanguard in saving animals from torture for profit. Seven years ago Israel’s highest court banned foie gras. Financially, this was no small sacrifice for a country that was one of the top five foie gras producers in the world. Israel isn’t the only country to take this step: to date the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Luxembourg, Norway, Poland, Sweden, Switzerland, and the U.K. have also banned foie gras. The United States lags behind – we have yet to place any nationwide limits on foie gras production, which is a gruesome, agonizing process.
Fur is a smaller industry than foie gras in Israel, but internationally fur “farmers” and trappers torture and murder billions of animals every year. The facts are chilling: farmers keep animals (including mink, foxes, chinchillas, lynxes, and others) crowded together in small cages for their entire lives, which are only a few months long unless they are kept for breeding. The confinement causes neurotic behaviors like self-mutilating. Once farmers no longer consider the animals financially productive, they kill them in any number of ways intended not to spoil their coats, including anal and vaginal electrocution, strangling, poisoning, and gassing. Sometimes the animal revives while being skinned.
Fur trappers target wild animals but they are none too particular about who exactly their traps snap shut on. Dogs, cats, and deer are among the species that American trappers throw away after their traps have maimed and sometimes slowly killed them. The trappers don’t have to worry about the animals who frantically chew off their own limbs to escape the trap, which usually leads to an even slower death from infection or bleeding (or a faster death from predation). The species that trappers target fare no better, of course. In other countries, like China, dogs and cats are farmed for fur. When you buy a coat with a fur trim that the label promises is fake, think twice – Chinese exports are sometimes labeled “faux fur” so as not to let American consumers know they are buying cat or dog fur.
One of the many tragedies of the fur industry is that it is supported only by fashion trends, which are ephemeral cultural constructs. All that needs to happen is for people to decide that fur is no longer “in,” and billions of animals would be spared.
Now to the elephant (killed for their ivory, not their skins, and held in slavery by circuses – perhaps a topic for a future blog) in the room: the hero of this piece is Israel, a country that makes the news daily because of terrorism and human rights abuses. Israel is a place where two peoples struggle to survive on one diminutive slip of land despite their mutual hatred and endless vendettas. How is it that a country so occupied with human survival has the vision and compassion to reduce the suffering of non-human animals?
Perhaps people whose daily lives are mired in violence, whether from hearing about it on the news or from mourning lost loved ones, know better than anyone the broad and toxic consequences of violence, the ripples it sends past its immediate victims and into the lives of the aggressors and beyond. Maybe those who know violence best are the most motivated to end it wherever they can.
A more humbling possibility is that even a nation that struggles daily just to survive, a nation in which human lives are in constant jeopardy and youth are almost universally drafted into mandatory military service, can spare the time to save other innocent beings from torture and murder. In contrast the United States, most of which is comparatively cocooned from violence, can’t spare even a thought for the victims of the fur trade. To the contrary, American women (for the most part) are among the industry’s most important supporters. Are we too self-absorbed or lacking in compassion to end the brutality against fur-bearing animals? Are we too unwilling to look behind the storefront window displays of coat-shaped pelts to the agony that turned thinking, feeling animals into outerwear?
Either way, Israel deserves kudos for even considering becoming the first country to make a national decision that fur is “out” forever. Cheer Israeli legislators on by sending a letter encouraging them to vote for the ban. Then take up the cause at home and make America proud.
