Now, aside from my self-serving reasons for posting this, I have to say I'm disturbed by the idea that stores are advertising products as fake fur when the fur is actually real. Especially if it's dog fur!
Posts: 1784 | Registered: Jun 2001
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posted
Nice article Kasie. I'm not willing to call them dogs in the traditional sense, because they are not Canis lupus familiaris or Canis at all but Nyctereutes procyonoides.
Posts: 5362 | Registered: Apr 2004
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posted
Well, most of them may not be, but three of them did have canis familiaris (Nordstrom, Tommy, Andrew Marc...)
Posts: 1784 | Registered: Jun 2001
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That fur trim on your jacket that you think is fake? Tell it to Fido. An animal advocacy group says its investigation has turned up coats — some with designer labels, some at higher-end retailers — with fur from man's best friend. Some retailers were set scrambling to pull the coats from shelves, take them off Web sites and even offer refunds to consumers.
The Humane Society of the United States said it purchased coats from reputable outlets, such as upscale Nordstrom, with designer labels — Andrew Marc, Tommy Hilfiger, for example — and found them trimmed with fur from domestic dogs, even though the fur was advertised as fake.
"It's an industrywide deception," said Kristin Leppert, the head of the Human Society's anti-fur campaign.
The investigation began after the society got a tip from a consumer who bought a coat with trim labeled as faux fur that felt real. Leppert and her team began buying coats from popular retailers and then had the coats tested by mass spectrometry, which measures the mass and sequence of proteins, to determine what species of animal the fur came from.
Of the 25 coats tested, 24 were mislabeled or misadvertised.
Three coats — from Tommy Hilfiger's Web site ShopTommy.com, Nordstrom.com and a coat from Andrew Marc's MARC New York line sold on Bluefly.com — contained fur from domesticated dogs. The others had fur from raccoon dogs — a canine species native to Asia — or, in one case, wolves. The single correctly labeled coat was trimmed with coyote fur, but it was advertised as fake.
posted
I completely understand being upset that "fake" fur isn't. (I wouldn't be, but that's because I don't avoid fur. Or leather for that matter.) However, I don't see why it matters what animal the fur came from. What, if it was a vicious little mink it would be better than a cute little doggie?
(And the link works now, but didn't a few minutes ago. *kicks Yahoo*)
Posts: 32919 | Registered: Mar 2003
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posted
(In response to the news item.) This is nothing new. I recall news stories from five and ten years ago that said essentially the same thing. I recall one television news item in particular that had video of cats in very very small cages that were, for lack of a better way of putting this, harvested for their fur.
ETA:
quote:Importing domestic dog and cat fur was outlawed in 2000. Intentionally importing and selling dog fur is a federal crime punishable by a $10,000 fine for each violation.
I have no idea if the news item I'm thinking of was before or after that date.
Posts: 8355 | Registered: Apr 2003
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quote:Originally posted by Dagonee: But then, I don't see why eating a horse is any worse than eating a cow.
Cows have cloven feet.
OK, add "for those who have not received direct instructions from God to the contrary" to the end of my sentence. Posts: 26071 | Registered: Oct 2003
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posted
Do they smell really bad when they get wet? People still buy fur?
You have to be careful when dealing with overseas manufacturing. They don't always understand what we consider important. We had a problem with one of our factories using lead paint on some of our kid’s products a few years ago. It never occurred to us to tell them not to use lead paint. Didn't really know you could still get lead paint. It didn't occur to them it would be an issue. One major recall later we now have several procedures in place to make sure none of our kid’s products have lead paint. You never know what your going to get from China.
Posts: 555 | Registered: Jun 2005
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posted
This has hoax written all over it. The most suspicious aspects:
* Passing of real fur as fake. Real fur is in the $100's to $10,000's range. Faux fur is in the $10's to $100's range. Even if the dog fur were practically free, it would make more sense to sell it as wolf fur. You'd be less likely to get caught, and get a higher price.
* The idea of skinning animals alive. I worked on a farm and I can tell you, this makes no sense. Why work on a struggling animal who won't stay still, when you can work on something that just lies there?
Posts: 1877 | Registered: Apr 2005
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posted
The first link. The second link will give you a way to see the graphic stuff, but in and of itself is fine.
Posts: 1784 | Registered: Jun 2001
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posted
Or, you like the way fur looks and feels, but you don't want to actually kill anything to feel that way.
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Possibly those who saw it can comment on the level of useful detail (who did it, etc.), to spare the rest of us who plan to eat!
Posts: 1877 | Registered: Apr 2005
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quote:Originally posted by Will B: Thanks for the warning.
Possibly those who saw it can comment on the level of useful detail (who did it, etc.), to spare the rest of us who plan to eat!
Warning: graphic descriptions of animal cruelty follow, in case you're sensitive.
Summary: China is a major source of furs. 95% of China's fur is exported to other countries; because of the lack of environmental control laws, many western countries also send their furs to China for tanning, etc., because the chemical runoff isn't a big deal.
Because fur exports are such a big business, there has been a noticeable increase in the number and decrease in the quality of fur farms. Animals are individually kept in small wire cages (elevated so excrement can collect beneath them) with nothing else present in the cages. As a result, they develop patterned behaviors that indicate stress.
The end of the documentary features a fur farmer selling his wares at a local market (as opposed to exporting). They bring the animals to the market live and customers select which ones they want. As the animals are selected, the farmer picks them up by the tail and slams their heads into the ground to disorient them. This is pretty effective, as the animals are tossed aside and are shown twitching and convulsing, but not fleeing. The animals tend to regain consciousness, at which point they are carefully clubbed in the head with a wooden stick to send them unconscious again. The skinning process starts with the hind legs: the skin is sliced and yanked up over the legs, and the knife is used where necessary where the skin and muscle are inseperable by yanking. Once the legs are exposed, the animals are tied up by their hind legs and hung upside down while the skinning proceeds: as they reach the torso, it looks like they're yanking a furry sock off an animal, until the bleeding starts.
The animals are fully conscious during this process, looking around and blinking and thrashing a bit.
The "after" shot is the most heartbreaking, as the animal is completely skinless in all the horrifying detail, its sad little eyes looking around (yes, it's STILL alive, and STILL conscious) slowly, until it tilts its head back, flops over and appears to die.
END GRAPHIC DESCRIPTION
.
The documentary sort of points fingers at the government for allowing this to happen, but ultimately doesn't come to any real conclusions. It's a "shocking report" which leaves the thinking up to everyone else.
Posts: 4313 | Registered: Sep 2004
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posted
While that graphic description sounds really bad, it's nothing worse than almost everybody in the U.S., with the exception of vegans, supports on a daily basis.
quote:Animals are individually kept in small wire cages (elevated so excrement can collect beneath them) with nothing else present in the cages. As a result, they develop patterned behaviors that indicate stress.
You can see the exact same thing at any normal egg or pork farm here.
Posts: 16551 | Registered: Feb 2003
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posted
I don't get the fuss. You buy a Cruella DeVille original, and you're surprised that it has dog fur in it?
Posts: 12266 | Registered: Jul 2005
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posted
"* The idea of skinning animals alive...makes no sense. Why work on a struggling animal who won't stay still, when you can work on something that just lies there?"
The belief is that torturing dogs produces meat with a better texture and a more pleasing flavor. It shouldn't be hard to find articles and videos of still conscious dogs being beaten with steel rods and wooden/bamboo batons about the body&legs, then skinned... ...but I ain't gonna be the one to do the lookin'.
quote:The belief is that torturing dogs produces meat with a better texture and a more pleasing flavor.
What???
Please tell me you're being facetious.
...huh?
The torture being described is beating, which is essentially tenderizing. Sounds pretty logical to me?
Posts: 4313 | Registered: Sep 2004
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posted
"What??? Please tell me you're being facetious."
Nope, I wish I were. The news articles&videos were on the Web before the "dog-fur sold as fake-fur" issue came up.
Posts: 8501 | Registered: Jul 2001
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posted
I don't understand, though. Why would it be better in any sense to skin a live animal than a dead one?
Posts: 1877 | Registered: Apr 2005
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quote:Originally posted by Will B: I don't understand, though. Why would it be better in any sense to skin a live animal than a dead one?
Depending on what means are readily available to (presumably) lower class farmers in China, killing the animal first might necessitate damaging part of the fur.
Posts: 4313 | Registered: Sep 2004
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quote:Originally posted by mr_porteiro_head: Not when done to a live animal.
My understanding is that the less tense the animal is when you kill it, the tenderer the meat is.
I don't know if that's really true, but that's my understanding.
Yes, I know: my point was that the logic involved in thinking beating an animal while alive produces a tenderer meat isn't counterintuitive.
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posted
"The torture being described is beating, which is essentially tenderizing."
The idea behind the torture has never been mechanical tenderization before slaughter, but rather to create stress. The modern "scientific"rationalization* of the old practice is that adrenaline and other stress hormones create a better texture and flavor. Which is 180degrees contrary to FirstWorld/halal/kosher beliefs about the effect of stress on animals slaughtered for meat.
* ie To devise self-satisfying reasons for one's behavior, especially to make irrational acts or feelings appear rational to oneself.
quote:Originally posted by mr_porteiro_head: Not when done to a live animal.
My understanding is that the less tense the animal is when you kill it, the tenderer the meat is.
I don't know if that's really true, but that's my understanding.
From what I've heard (through a co-worker who's a re-enacter and a co-worker whose husband is a hunter): People who eat venison generally don't like to get deer that have been hit by cars. The impact with the car sends adrenaline through the deer's body and it changes the flavor of the meat - not in a good way.
Posts: 2034 | Registered: Apr 2004
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"People who eat venison generally don't like to get deer that have been hit by cars. The impact with the car sends adrenaline through the deer's body and it changes the flavor of the meat - not in a good way."
Yep, the belief that survival and consciousness past the first impact ruins the meat is one reason that good hunters hate making wounding shots: ie a shot which doesn't drop&kill the prey immediately.
posted
The reason people get upset about things happening to dogs, cats, and horses that they seem to tolerate when they happen to cows, sheep, pigs, turkeys, or chickens, is that we carefully comparmentalize species into companion animals and food animals. Companion animals we know as individuals, we love them for their personalities, and we realize they feel pain and agony, have desires, hopes, suffer disappointments, feel joy, and that they love their babies, and so on just like we do. Food animals feel these same things, but we don't know any of those personally, so we don't have to think about it in the same way.
Lots of humans have this same compartmentalization of people of their ethic group vs. people of a different ethnic group. That's why we're rather genocidal. There was a time when Neanderthals and anatomically modern humans coexisted in Europe and Asia. What would you bet happened to the Neanderthals? We don't know for sure, but my guess is that humans exterminated them.
The fact that humans do this sort of thing to animals, (and to each other) I think of as our "original sin" in the sense that when we wake up and realize how we've acted all along, we are horrified. And not just that but we're all complicit. We all buy cheap stuff from China or other third world places. How could we not? The only way would be to live like the Amish, with technology frozen. And if we did that, it would still go on.
The thing I think we need to do, is make the first world and third world back into one world. We need for the companies here to say "no we won't buy your stuff if you harm animals, spew filth into the environment, treat your workers like slaves, pay them less than a living wage, work kids long hours" etc. We have to have the same standards overseas as we have here. And we have to publicize what goes on in slaughterhouses so nobody who eats meat can do so without realizing what price is paid by animals for their taste for meat.
People seem upset about furs in particular, but I've never seen why. If someone were going to kidnap me and my whole family, ship us by train or truck to a camp where we were herded in with other humans, then led through chutes to be executed one by one, it would be of some passing concern to me how brutal the execution was, but not much. I would be a little curious whether my skin was to be made into lampshades, or my hair into a wig, my bones into glue, or my muscles into a meal, but not really all that much. What I would mainly be concerned with is doing everything I could to make it stop.
When people say "animals aren't human and you shouldn't anthropomorphize them" do we really believe that animals don't feel agony like we do? Do we believe that they don't love their children? How can we turn a blind eye to how humans collectively treat animals so often as industrial machinery?
Posts: 6246 | Registered: Aug 2004
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posted
For me, it's the talk of skinning animals alive.
I know what goes on in slaughterhouses and how animals are treated and killed on farms. I have no problem with that, and personally, it has nothing to do with species. I'm not squicked out by the fact that some people in parts of the world eat dog just like I'm not squicked out by the fact that I eat chicken or goat.
And I very much agree with the concept of people knowing where their food comes from and what it takes to get it to their table.
I am bothered by unnecessary cruelty, which skinning animals alive falls into, regardless of whether it's cat, dog, rhino, horse, or pig.
Posts: 8355 | Registered: Apr 2003
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posted
Great post Tatiana, and I agree with most of it, and certainly the sentiment behind it.
Of course, maintaining such international standards would require international co-operation, lest the partaking country be severely disadvantaged, and will ultimately require significant sacrifices on the part of the consumer. The bottom line is that what we have today, we only have because of our unsustainable practices.
There is also the issue with many developed countries that adopting such standards in the near future would be impossible; the ecological footprint of many major cities like London far outweigh the carrying capacity of the countries they are in.
quote:Originally posted by Tatiana:
Do we believe that they don't love their children?
I do actually. Love as I understand it is a capacity which requires sentience. I ascribe maternal behaviour to instinct.
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