Last year my husband and I were watching the Made in Chelsea Christmas special when Pete turned to me (sorry for publicly outing you as a MiC viewer, husband) and stage-whispered “Look at Harry’s coat“. Yes, lady’s man Harry Baron was wearing a Canada Goose parka, his hood trimmed with the company’s trademark coyote fur. It’s fitting that one of the show’s most maligned characters was wearing Canada Goose, the villain of the high street when it comes to using animal skin in its clothing. Their fur comes exclusively from wild coyotes (in the same family as our domesticated dogs) whose limbs are clamped in cruel traps. Some mothers will chew off their legs in order to get back to their pups, while other coyotes might be trapped for days before the hunter comes for them. These dogs wait for their trappers terrified, starving, in terrible pain, and when they’re finally found, they are bludgeoned, strangled or shot. Watch this video here if you can bear to.
Is fur back in fashion?
Of course Canada Goose aren’t the only company using real fur, the recent ‘Beast from the East’ bringing out many other ‘beasts’, draped around the shoulders of affluent Londoners or hipsters showing off their vintage finds. I’ve never seen so much real fur being paraded around; I’d find myself shoved up against a pelt on the tube in rush hour, or pulling my live dog back from brushing someone’s dead coyote hood on the escalator. Distressingly, fur seems to be becoming fashionable again, even my favourite Instagram accounts like EveryOutfitonSexandtheCity posting glamorised fur coat images with the hashtag #FurMoment. Celebrities like the Kardashians and Rihanna parading fur are undoubtedly partly responsible, sanctioning animal skin as a ‘glamorous accessory’ to their billions of impressionable followers. Canada Goose just experienced their most profitable year yet, despite many fashion houses deciding to go fur-free (not just vegan Stella McCartney but also Ralph Lauren, Calvin Klein, Armani, Tommy Hilfiger, Hugo Boss, Vivienne Westwood, and most recently, Gucci). San Francisco’s recent decision to ban the sale of real fur across the whole city is huge, but why aren’t we seeing this reflected in everyday attitudes? Instead, we see models like Jenner posting an image of a cute Bambi-esque fawn six pictures after flaunting a dead animal pelt backstage at Milan Fashion Week. The disconnect is real.
Unjustifiable cruelty
The fur industry is uncompromisingly cruel; there’s simply no way to justify the suffering it causes for the sake of a non-essential item of clothing. Animals trapped in the wild aren’t even the main victims of mankind’s dirty fur habit: 88 per cent of skins come from animals on fur farms, who spend their entire lives confined in cramped and dirty wire cages. They can’t move more than a few steps in any direction or do anything that is natural and important to them: unsurprisingly, many of these animals go literally insane. They self-mutilate, pace and circle endlessly, attempting to cope by developing repetitive behaviour patterns known as stereotypies, what we might call ‘nervous ticks’.
SPCA fur farmed fox, by Jo-Anne McArthur / We Animals
Fur farmed white fox by Jo-Anne McArthur / We Animals
Fur farmers use the cheapest slaughter methods possible to keep the pelts intact, and these can result in extreme suffering for the animals (a quick internet search will show you some of these). If this isn’t horrifying enough, some animals even wake up while they are being skinned.
Is your fur really faux?
Of course there’s zero reason to wear real fur these days when excellent quality faux fur products flood the high street. There are two camps of thought when it comes to the ethics of faux. Some people believe that it normalises and perpetrates the conception of fur as a glamorous accessory, and makes it harder to identify (and I suppose, shame) people wearing real animal fur. Others see the promotion of faux fur as a chance to show people that they can achieve the same look without the cruelty, a similar argument used by vegans to endorse meat substitutes. Personally, I fall into the second camp, but I urge buyers to take care that they are actually buying faux.
There have been a lot of recent cases where companies have used real fur – even pet fur – in their supposedly synthetic products. As Claire Bass, director of Humane Society International UK, says, “Fur is tragically so cheap. It can be produced for the same or less than the cost of fake fur.” In 2016, the charity carried out laboratory tests on three items being sold as faux fur on the high street, including a £15 scarf, and found them to be made of mink, fox and rabbit. It’s a mark of the numbers of animals farmed that real fur is now actually cheaper to use than artificial alternatives (it’s a similar economy to cheap meat; the more animals and worse conditions, the cheaper the end product). There are now so many animals in captivity that skinning a creature alive (an animal that is often actually quite rare in the wild) is cheaper than creating a synthetic version. This also means that people who are genuinely trying to make ethical choices unknowingly become part of the problem. To avoid this, PETA offer a very helpful video showing how to check that your fur is actually faux. I do this as a matter of routine now, first checking the root of the fur to see if it’s woven in (synthetic) or actually implanted (fur), then checking whether the fur is blunt (synthetic) or tapers off (real). You can also set fire to a couple of hairs and see if it smells like burning plastic (synthetic) or human hair (fur). I don’t advise doing that in the John Lewis cushion section though!
On fur farms, water bowls are often left to dry up for weeks. Image by Jo-Anne McArthur / We Animals
I showed this post to a friend and she reminded me about one of the more bizarre uses of fur, normalised in the beauty industry – mink eyelashes. If you’re not freaked out at the thought of gluing dead animal to your eyes, you might go for ‘humanely harvested’ mink lashes, but of course, as this article points out, there is no situation where mink fur could be ‘harvested’ apart from on a fur farm. And there is no kind of mink farm where the animals are allowed to roam free. I recently received some amazing Unicorn Cosmetics vegan eyelashes in my VeganKind beauty box and this site lists synthetic lash brands.
Despite the best intentions of most UK consumers, looking at the glamourized images of fur on Instagram and the infiltration of real fur into cheap high street accessories, it can feel like we’re fighting a losing battle. But the new legislation in San Francisco is an incentive not to give up any time soon. So I’ll keep posting comments on social media calling out real fur, I’ll carry on obsessively checking pompoms in New Look, I’ll sign every petition against fur going, I’ll attend protests, I’ll support vegan brands, and I’ll give Canada Goose-wearing tube passengers my filthiest glare. When it comes to an industry as vile as fur, keeping quiet just isn’t an option.
