FUR YOUR EYES ONLY

I’m not really in on the ‘chain mail’ and ‘e-mail forwards’ scene. But this week, two friends of mine called and insisted that I must, for once, open their e-mails in my ‘inbox’. “Not the regular stuff!”, “You won’t be disappointed”, This is important”… they sent texts till I gave in, pulled out my wallet and fished for the little strip of brown paper on which I had noted down my password…

“!@#$*”… password entered in, and voila, sitting right on top of a neat pile of unread messages were the two e-mails. I clicked on the first one. It had a link… click! It was a ‘youtube’ video about fur farms in China. If you haven’t seen it, let me take you through it…

The video was apparently shot in secrecy and carries footage from a number of Chinese fur farms where visitors are usually not allowed. China is one of the world’s largest producers of cheap fur that finds itself on trimmings and coats in shopping malls around the world, including perhaps the one in your neighbourhood. The film opens with images of foxes and minks housed in wire cages so tiny that it would make even the act of turning seem like an acrobatic feat; then it zooms in into the eyes of a beautiful animal, a raccoon dog. It is a type of wild dog and looks like a cute little grey and black panda with a tail. It is found in China, and like the mink, is bred in farms for its fur. The animal looks soulfully into the camera. Just then, a hand opens the latch, catches the animal by its tail, and pulls it out. The man holds the animal by its hind legs, swings it up in a manner reminiscent of the washer men at the ‘dhobi ghat’ and brings it down on the hard earth with a sickening thud… the impact smashes the animal’s face and perhaps breaks its neck. A close-up reveals that the animal is still alive as it blinks into the camera… next to it lie other raccoon dogs that had previously received the same treatment. The odd quivering leg or flick of a tail tells you that the body may be broken but is very much alive.

A hand grabs three of these broken animals by their tails and carries them away to a pole where one of them is picked up and one of its hind legs is tied to a loop. There the animal hangs, upside down. The man takes out a big knife, and one is grateful for the fact that the animal has stopped moving… perhaps it is finally dead. The man starts cutting the skin from the leg that was tied and in pain, the poor dog, still very much alive, starts kicking and screaming… unperturbed, the man continues to cut open the skin around the tail and keeps peeling it off with his hands as if he was removing a sweater off a child. The animal continues to struggle, but its strength gives way and by the time the man is pulling the skin off the raccoon dog’s neck and face, it is almost still. The pelt comes off in one piece and the animal, a ghastly naked pink and white with blotches of deep red is pulled off the rope and thrown onto a heap of other pink bodies. Tufts of hair around the paws are all that remain of the soft fur that it once called its own. As the pain-wracked body settles on the heap, the rear leg twitches, and to one’s horror the dog lifts its pink head and looks right at you, through the camera… The eyes look abnormally big on that frightening visage… skinned alive, the head kept lolling as the animal writhed in unimaginable pain for unending minutes.

That wasn’t the end of the video though. Then there was a fox that was taken out of a cage and this time it was clubbed with an iron pipe a couple of times… the skinners didn’t bother to check if the animal was dead and started cutting it up. The fox which had perhaps only been stunned came to his senses and started struggling again. This time the man didn’t bother with the club and just kicked the animals head with his boots and then stood on the animal’s neck. Thick red blood came out in spurts from its nostrils, as others kept working on it with the knife. Another clip showed another fur farm where the animals kept in those cages were domestic dogs, cats and rabbits… the cages were being dropped from the back of a truck and the animals were howling in pain because they were breaking limbs on impact… and then more bludgeoning and ‘skinning alive’ followed. It is not easy for me to write this for the images dance in front of my eyes as I write, and the knowledge that I too might have encouraged these horrid acts through buying decisions only makes it more difficult…

Fur, after a self-conscious hiatus, has returned on garment racks around the world with China leading the way, followed by countries like Russia, France and even India. While the exclusive and expensive mink and ermine coats had always been around, they had experienced a dip in global popularity until faux fur showed up and then fur, both faux and real, showed up with a vengeance on runways and shop windows. Today, in stores, alongside a mink you could find coats and trimmings made of rabbit fur (either from India or France) and fox fur, as well as cheap fur from the raccoon dog. While some websites might say that fur from China is the one you should be wary of, the truth is that fur from anywhere can only be obtained by acts of barbaric cruelty… it is in the nature of industry.

In fur farms, from the raccoon dog farms of China to the rabbit farms in Himachal Pradesh, and in the wild, on the ice floes of Canada where every year hundreds of baby seals are beaten to death and in the north European tundra where a fur bearing animal like a sable or fox could lie trapped in snares in the snow for days till the trapper returns and puts it out of its misery (many gnaw their own paws off and escape but then die of their wounds), everywhere, the animals are killed slowly and painfully because the pelts need to be blemish-free and the relatively more humane (if there could be such a word in this context) methods you could imagine are all likely to damage the pelt and drastically reduce the price that it would fetch. Designer labels, from Armani and Gautier to Dior and Cavalli, they all use fur, some even after having sworn they ‘won’t ever again’. You and I, we walk into those stores, run our fingers along the soft warmth of the trim, admire the elegance of the apparel and if we can afford it, we pick it up and hope to bask in the green tinged light of admiration on an appropriate occasion, refusing to think of the animal that once hid its nose in that same fur to keep itself warm; refusing to think of the monstrous and unimaginably brutal process through which that hide was snatched from its rightful owner while it thrashed about in pain so that it could reach me and feed my vanity; refusing to see the blood that reddens my hand every time I run my fingers through its unbelievable softness.

And faux fur needn’t be any better. A lot of real fur emerging out of China is a lot cheaper than faux fur and is often used on trimmings mixed with faux fur. A number of stores that claimed, and apparently believed, they were selling faux fur, were in fact selling raccoon dog fur. It was so cheap that even consumers couldn’t believe they had picked up real fur. (‘Real faux fur’ will always have a fabric base, while ‘fake faux’ will have a skin base)

Karl Langerfeld, head designer for Chanel, insists that fur is fair because it is an industry that supports so many today and it is a case of a fair battle between man and beast and one’s got to win. What do I say to such naiveté? See the video about ‘fur farms’ on peta.org and you’ll know for yourself. As for this savagery supporting an industry, well so did slavery but a President and a nation went to war for it. Knowingly or unknowingly, many amongst us would have supported this cruel trade in the past but there is no excuse now. You can’t say “I don’t want to see that gruesome video” and pretend you don’t know any better and keep buying fur because the truth is, you do… but if you still think you’ll look good only if you hang a bleeding carcass around your neck, well then maybe you really need it more than the poor animal did…

This winter, what we buy, or don’t buy, will go a small way towards strengthening or weakening an industry that posterity is bound to be ashamed of… And on such a day, how would history look back at us?