FUR INDUSTRY
Animals that live in captivity on fur ranches suffer, as do animals caught by trapping. Ranched animals, like mink and fox, are kept in tiny cages for their short, miserable and lonely lives. A fox cage is 2.5 feet square with one to four animals per cage.
The stress causes them to attack or cannibalize each other. Mink are kept in 1 by 3 foot cage with several to one cage. Such crowding and confinement is distressful, especially to minks that are solitary animals by instinct. Ranched animal self-mutilate - bite at their fur, tails, and feet. Most are literally driven insane by their environment - pacing and circling endlessly. The cages are in open sheds on fur farms that provide little or no protection from the heat or cold, or wind.
Ranched animals are fed meat and fish byproducts and leftover viscera from a butchered animal, which can cause bacterial contamination that leads to food poisoning. These animals suffer fleas, ticks, lice, disease-carrying flies, urinary tract infections, & contagious diseases, like viral enteritis.
The killing methods for ranched animals are gruesome. Fur farmers want the pelts kept pristine, so they use slaughter methods that cause terrible suffering for the animals. Small animals are shoved into a boxes where they are poisoned by carbon monoxide from truck engine exhaust. Because carbon monoxide is not always lethal, man awake to consciousness while being skinned! Larger animals, like foxes, suffer "genital electrocution" - they have clamps attached to their lips while rods are inserted into their anuses and they are painfully electrocuted. The American Veterinary Medical Association has deemed this electrocution "unacceptable" because the animal suffers the pain of cardic arrest while conscious.
Some fur farmers have been known to inject minks in the chest with mixtures of rubbing alcohol and weed killers. Neck snapping, decompression chambers and gassing are other methods.
Fur products are not environmentally friendly. They don't biodegrade because of mortants, which are chemicals used to stop decomposition. Fur farms have caused water contamination with these chemicals.
A fur product represents the suffering of dozens of animals, trapped or ranched. The manufacture of fur products is damaging to the environment. When the public refuses to buy or wear fur products, only then will the misery and death of millions of animals each year be stopped. We must educate others for the animals' sake.
SUGGESTED READING: "Fur Statistics" Humane Society of the United States, September 1993.
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