Use of real animal fur has shot up worldwide and it’s not surprising when the fur trade is a multi-billion dollar worldwide industry involving breeders, trappers, hunters, buyers, dealers, manufacturers, stores, designers and the whole fashion industry. The United States tops the consumption and UK and rest of the world is catching up fast trampling innumerable innocent animals in the name of fashion.
Exposed
1. UK fur imports touched record levels in the recent years
2. Celebrities, super models and designers are heavily using real fur to boost the blood-soaked fashion
3. Efforts of anti-cruelty lobbyists have achieved little success
4. Real fur clothing sales have hit £7bn globally, with £500m in UK alone
5. There has been 30 per cent increase in total sales in two years
6. New fur products worth £40m are imported every year in UK
Lives actually bearing the brunt
1. More and more young animals are hunted
2. Fur-bearing animals are forcibly caged and sometimes skinned alive, including Canadian seals
3. Around 40 million animals are killed for the fur trade each year exposing the extreme cruelty animals go through worldwide
4. 300,000 baby seals were killed in Canada alone this year
5. Common animal sources: rabbit, mink, seal, fox, wolf, beaver, otter, sable, raccoon, ermine, coyote, chinchilla, domestic cat and domestic dog
Who is the main culprit?
1. People, who actually prefer wearing fur clothes
2. Fashion designers who do not resist from presenting real fur clothes in an endeavor to make big profits
3. Designers also market real fur embellished with dyes, making it more appealing and directly luring people to buy it
4. Use of fur clothes by celebrities entice people towards its use and undeniably dilutes the fact that it’s wrong
5. Stores sale fur products fooling people that it’s fake when most of it is real
Bottom Line
UK Government is planning to ban all imports of harp and hooded seal products; it should have been done long back – the United States has already banned imports of seals and EU recently imposed a ban on use of cat and dog fur. When synthetic substitutes of fur are available, there is no point in killing thousands of innocent animals per year. It’s terrible that fur advocates back their business saying ‘that fur is a renewable resource and that synthetic fur is a petroleum product and is therefore more harmful to the environment than genuine fur.’
Banning use of real fur clothes and curbing all import, export and killing of fur animals can restrict the bloodbath and phase out fur trade completely. People running these so-called ‘Fur Farms’ should be dealt sternly, creating an example for other users and offenders, especially, fashion stores, designers and models. Incessant anti-fur campaigns, as done by PETA, too can play a constructive role with actual participation from people from all lifestyles and more importantly, we can come out with concrete results by pledging not to use real fur and shut the door on cruelty.
Via: The Independent