With the winter season approaching, I urge you to stop selling fur at your store. Here's why: Millions of fur-bearing animals including foxes, raccoons, minks, coyotes, bobcats, lynxes, opossums, nutria, beavers, muskrats, otters, and others are killed each year on fur farms by anal and vaginal electrocution and in the wild by drowning, trapping, or beating. Ranch-raised foxes are kept in cages only 2.5 feet square (minks in cages 1-foot-by-3-feet), with up to four animals per cage.
To kill the animals without damaging their fur, trappers usually strangle, beat, or stomp them to death. Animals on fur farms may be gassed, electrocuted, poisoned with strychnine, or have their necks snapped. These methods are not 100 percent effective and some animals "wake up" while being skinned. There are no federal laws providing protection for the millions of animals who suffer and die on fur farms.
Animals can languish in traps for days. Up to 1 out of every 4 animals caught in leghold traps escapes by chewing off his or her own feet. They may die days later from blood loss, fever, gangrene, or predation. Every year, thousands of dogs, cats, raptors, and other so-called "trash" animals are crippled or killed by leghold traps.
Furs are also bad for the environment. Furs are loaded with chemicals to keep them from decomposing in buyers%u2019 closets. It takes more than 15 times as much energy to produce a fur coat from ranch-raised animals than it does to produce a fake fur. Plus, the waste produced on fur farms poisons our waterways.
Major designers like Ralph Lauren, Calvin Klein, J. Crew, Ann Taylor, Stella McCartney, have stopped using fur in their designs because it is the humane thing to do.
Please take the fur-free pledge and stop selling fur. It's time that you stop supporting the brutal fur industry and remove fur off your store racks for good.
