Pro/Con: Any Good Reason For People To Wear Furs?

NO:

Dave Bowman

Times copy editor

NORDSTROM'S recent decision to close its fur salons was yet another nail in that industry's coffin. The hammer is poised to drive home the remaining nails. And the blows are coming quicker.

Sagging profits, shuttered stores, societal scorn: It's a bad time to be a furrier. There no longer is any rationale for wearing hairy hides - remember, folks, this ain't the frontier no more - and the blood has become harder to conceal. Fur as fashion? You might as well wear sausage links.

Nordstrom said the move was strictly business, not a capitulation to pressure from animal-rights groups. Whatever the motive, this much is evident: The cultivation of fur for vanity's sake carries more of a stigma than ever, and merchants are getting the message. When one domino goes, others soon follow.

Fur is dead. Fur is grim. Fur no longer is a status symbol. It looks good only on its original owners: the minks and foxes and other splendid animals that are destroyed by the thousands every day on farms and in the wild, victims of their own beauty.

According to The Animals' Agenda magazine, fur sales slumped to $1.1 billion last year, their lowest figure since 1982. Many furriers, sensing the fall, have sidestepped into the manufacture of leather goods.

Consequently, pelt procurers have seen their killing decline in value. Only 231,073 U.S. trappers bought licenses last winter, a 32

percent decrease from two years earlier. And the total number of animals trapped for fur plummeted from 17 million in 1986-87 to 3.8 million in 1989-90, an unprecedented 77 percent dropoff.

The same article reports that the last of the 22 fur salons that once lined New York's upper Broadway shut down last summer, as did major furriers in Washington, Atlanta and Philadelphia. Others have relocated, driven out by substantial losses and public disdain. More dominoes tumbling.

The European Community has voted to ban the importation of furs beginning in 1995, according to The Animal Welfare Institute. This follows a resolution calling for imported pelts to be labeled to indicate whether they were from animals caught in the leg-hold trap, a device stunningly simple in its brutality.

Scores of celebrities are forsaking this formerly ``chic'' commodity. Loretta Swit, Bob Barker, Princess Diana: all have lined up against the fur trade. Tony La Russa, the kinder, gentler manager of the American League champion Oakland A's, has made anti-fur pitches in appearances across the country (including a ``fur funeral'' in Seattle last February).

And most everyday Americans - the best barometer of all - want nothing to do with fur. Last year, according to People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, 85 percent of the respondents to a Parents magazine poll were opposed to the killing of wildlife for such a purpose.

Aside from the basic crudeness of wrapping yourself in a marten or lynx (it takes 11 of these cats to make one coat), there is the awful reality of suffering. George Clements, executive director of The Fur-Bearers, a Vancouver, B.C.-based organization that works to protect wild animals from this deadly market, distilled the barbarity of trapping at a recent Seattle meeting of the Progressive Animal Welfare Society (PAWS).

As the audience watched in horror, Clements - using sturdy sticks in place of fleshy limbs - demonstrated the ruthless efficiency of the leg-hold, snare and conibear traps. They crush, choke and clamp, suddenly and randomly, on land and in water, subjecting their uncomprehending victims to untold hours of agony.

Pets, and even people, have been maimed by them. Once ensnared, an animal has virtually no chance of escape - save for gnawing off the afflicted body part. Death's release often comes slowly, painfully.

These grisly implements, banned in more than 65 nations around the world, still are widely used in the U.S. and Canada. To make matters worse, teaching our children the fundamentals of slaughter is still seen as some sort of civic duty. Those who protest at state-sanctioned trapping classes are roughed up or arrested. Where is our decency?

Defenders point out that more and more fur is ``ranched,'' a devious euphemism for a different type of cruelty. On a fur farm, chinchillas, ermines, and other species are kept in cramped, filthy wire cages; with no regulations to protect them, they are vulnerable to freezing cold and withering heat, and sometimes go days without adequate food.

When their time is up, they are gassed, clubbed, suffocated or electrocuted. Your fur is ready, ma'am.

Ranchers who contend they treat their animals humanely - concerned not about their welfare, but their marketability - are missing the point: These creatures are sovereign entities; they are not here for our use; their lustrous coats belong to them.

If you own a fur, get rid of it. If you're thinking of buying one, don't. Compassion is always in fashion.

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YES:

HUMANKIND has been wearing fur since the Ice Age - some say since God, the first furrier, clothed Adam and Eve. As we approach the 21st century, though, many urbanites question the right of people to wear animal skins, or to eat animals, or indeed to benefit from any animal use whatever.

They join one or more of the estimated 7,000 tax-exempt animal-rights groups and receive horror magazines in the mail. They attend emotionally charged meetings of what Robert Barrett, a chinchilla-raising college professor, calls the religion of ``animalism.''

The only rational objection to the use of animals is a moral one, espoused by a few contemporary philosophers, more dedicated to theory than reality.

``Animalites'' would have people wear synthetics, cotton and linen: cruelty-free clothing. But the use of non-renewable petroleum for synthetics is damaging to the environment, and direct destruction of animal habitat for raising vegetable fibers makes the phrase ``cruelty-free clothing'' a myth.

The route from petrochemicals and vegetable fibers to fashionable attire is less direct than that from animals to fur garments. ``Homeless'' animals, robbed of habitat by agriculture or destroyed as crop pests, are also victims of cruelty.

It is important to manage wildlife in its dwindling home so that one species does not endanger the survival of others. Only the human animal is able to systematically prevent overpopulation, with its resultant starvation and disease outbreaks.

Examples of problems caused by wildlife overpopulation:

-- In Montgomery, Mass., the beaver population has been building dams faster than work crews can demolish them, causing a brook to threaten to overflow the town's main thoroughfare.

-- Beavers, in order to build a dam on the Truckee River in Reno, damaged 90 percent of the trees, endangering the habitats of 135 species of birds and 40 species of mammals, as well as countless fish that rely on shade to survive the summer heat.

-- In coastal wetlands of Louisiana, an overabundance of muskrats and nutria overeat marsh grasses that stabilize the wetlands, creating open water subject to erosion, eventual land loss, and possible salt-water intrusion; destroying shellfish and migrating waterfowl habitat.

Beaver, muskrat and nutria are, of necessity, being harvested by professional trappers using humane trap sets. It is wasteful for valuable animal hides to be tossed on a garbage heap.

With a healthy fur industry, trappers have the economic incentive to trap these surplus animals at no cost to the public.

Trappers and sportsmen serve as ``antennae'' for our largely urbanized country. While living and working on the land, they are often the first to alert society to habitat degradation, chemical pollution, and other threats to wildlife and humanity.

Furbearing animals have been raised on farms in North America since shortly after the Civil War. Good nutrition, comfortable housing, and prompt veterinary care have resulted in domestic animals well suited to the farm scene.

Meat industries sell their byproducts (unfit for human consumption) to fur farms, which use - in addition to the hides - every part of the animal: byproducts in food for other animals and oils in cosmetics. Thus, food industries can offer human food at cheaper prices than otherwise.

Farm manure is used to fertilize fields that produce vegetables and grains for humankind and for poultry, pork and beef. And the food chain continues.

The Fur Farm Animal Welfare Coalition has developed guidelines for humane care and euthanasia for farmed mink and fox. The coalition certifies only farms that follow stringent guidelines for humane animal treatment. Ranched minks, on the average, live longer lives than wild ones and meet a more humane death.

So why not wear fur? There's only one rational reason: You believe it is morally wrong to benefit from any animal use. You agree with the argument that even if animal use is essential, it's wrong.

So why wear fur?

As a garment material, fur is particularly durable and long lasting. A fur coat is often restyled a time or two within its 20 or so years of usefulness.

Furthermore, fur is a natural product, a fully renewable and biodegradable resource - and one cornerstone of genuine, long-term environmentalism. Wearing fur still indicates an appreciation for its practicality, a reverence for its beauty, and an admiration for the ancient and honorable furrier's art.

MaryAnn Blakely Wagner, Ph.D., of Kent is a retired educator and a member of Putting People First.