New Global Network Against the Fur Industry

There is a new international network of organizations against fur, which includes groups and individual activists from the animal rights/liberation movements from various countries: Austria, Belgium, Estonia, Germany, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Switzerland, the United Kingdom.


It is called Global Network Against the Fur Industry, it was formed this autumn and it’s started its activity with a campaign against the ESCADA group.

Escada is a high fashion international company, with headquarters in Aschheim/Munich, Germany. It is involved in many stages of the process of fur garments production and sales: from designing its own collections to producing them in its own factories, to selling them in its own shops, in shop-in-shops and in concessions in department stores.

The ESCADA Group owns a sussidiary company called Primera, which in turn owns other brands: apriori, BiBA, cavita and Laurèl. All these companies and brands use fur for their collections.

There are 240 ESCADA stores all over the world, mainly in Europe (130), Asia (86) and North America (25), with a few in South America, Africa, Australia. In addition, there are the stores of other brands owned by the company: almost 400 stores, mostly in Europe but also worldwide.

The choice of ESCADA as a target is due to the fact that this is a company which has a huge influence on the catwalks of the world; if Escada stops using fur, this will send a signal to the fashion industry as a whole.

The Global Network Against the Fur Industry has organized a first weekend of international action against ESCADA’s fur trade on 12th – 14th October 2007. Many protests have taken places worldwide.

In Florence, the Escada store remained closed all day on Sunday 14th October, to avoid bad publicity in view of the protest, with consequent loss of revenue. As a result, the campaigners moved their protest to a department store, COIN, to force them to stop selling fur following the example of two other major Italian department stores chains, La Rinascente and UPIM.

The ZARA, Guess, H&M campaigns show how important global cooperation of anti-fur organizations is and how effective it can be in changing the policies of major retail groups.

Visit the Global Network Against the Fur Industry new website.

Human health and animal ethics

Human health and animal ethics posts

Human health & animal ethics: an introduction to this Category
 
Mesothelioma and asbestos
 
Carcinogens, food poisoning and meat
 
The greatest scientific event of the millennium
 
Thalidomide tragedy, side effects, history
 
Carcinogenicity studies on animals
 
Cancer and animals
 
The half vegan monks who are the world's healthiest people
 
Eating bacon and sausages every day increases cancer risk by 20%, new authoritative report says
 
Growth in animal farming increases disease risks for humans, says FAO
 
Meat workers health problems
 

Human health & animal ethics: an introduction to this Category

Of all the major areas of animal exploitation, two of them, animal experimentation and farming, have two fundamental characteristics in common, which will make them, in my opinion, the real battleground on which the case for animal rights and equality will be fought.

What vivisection and farming have in common is: 1) they involve an enormous number of animals, far superior, at least in the case of farming, to other areas of animal abuse; 2) there is an appearance (I underline “appearance”) of genuine conflict between the liberation of animals from these two forms of abuse and human health, which in many people’s minds, unfortunately, justifies them on moral grounds.

For this reason I’ve created a special category in the current blog, Human health and animal ethics, to explore this assumed conflict between human and non-human animal interests. In animal testing, the conflict is purported to be in the fact that renouncing it would deprive medicine of an irreplaceable tool of immense value, or at least this is the claim. In animal farming, the conflict is said to derive from the fact that humans need to eat animal flesh products to stay healthy, believed by many people to be true despite the repeated assertions to the contrary by the most prestigious medical authorities and organizations in the world, who say that the opposite is true and vegetarianism is indeed a healthier option.

All other forms of animal exploitation do not involve any real, important human interest. Nobody can claim that they will die or become ill without a fur coat (not even Eskimos), if they don’t attend circuses, if they don’t visit zoos, don’t go fishing or hunting.

The lame excuses of some of these animal abusers, like hunters justifying torturing foxes to death because they are “pests”, are only seriously believed or appeared to be believed by themselves and their close supporters.

But with vivisection and animal farming, the belief that they are necessary for human health is widely held by a majority, so it needs to be addressed with empirical and logical instruments. I’ll do that in this category, which has the advantage of tackling both major areas of animal abuse with one common approach useful for both, and I will also explore the tricky question of whether veganism can really be suitable for human health: on this issue I have to say that I am not convinced myself. People wouldn’t need vitamin tablets to supplement a vegan diet if the latter were an appropriate, fully well-balanced diet. And if you look at it from a naturalistic viewpoint, the human species is not a herbivorous species: we use a similar argument against meat-eating when we say that humans are not a carnivorous species, so it seems to me that, if we are intellectually honest, we recognize that the argument cuts both ways.

San Marino bans vivisection

Maybe a small step, but it seems highly significant to me: the Republic of San Marino, an independent state lying entirely in north-east Italy, has abolished all experiments on animals.

This tiny country on the Adriatic Coast, which already has the record of being the oldest republic in the world, now can be proud of another record in the history of civilization: to be the first country on the globe to totally forbid animal experimentation.

In February of this year the Associazione Sammarinese Protezione Animali (A.P.A.S.) presented a law proposal supported by citizens’ signatures to ban vivisection, which on the 20th September 2007 has been approved by the General Council, San Marino’s legislative body.

Now San Marino can call itself a “cruelty-free country”, at least as far as animal experimentation is concerned.

"We are very happy of this result, so good and quick" say Marina Berati from NoVivisezione.org and Massimo Tettamanti, Europe manager for I-CARE (Centro Internazionale per le Alternative nella Ricerca e nella Didattica), who, along with Stefano Cagno from Rome’s Lega Anti-Vivisezione, have been helping to achieve this outcome, "and A.P.A.S. volunteers have been extremely determined and successful. From now on San Marino will be off-limits for chemical and pharmaceutical companies carrying out animal tests and for all research institutions, both public and private, often funded by unaware members of the public, which base their research on vivisection".

A.P.A.S. Press Office says that thanks to this new law, which heavily punishes animal experimenters, San Marino Republic will represent a pole of attraction for companies using methods alternative to vivisection, which are better, more reliable and cheaper too.

I don’t know how many animal tests were conducted in San Marino before the introduction of this law. But I don’t think that the number of animals saved is the only issue here. I believe that this is a breakthrough anyway, because it establishes a precedent and has great historical significance, morally and politically.

Ethical wool

There is a British company producing wool garments, Izzy Lane, that is actually doing good to animals. So, if you like wool but don’t want to contribute to the exploitation and abuse of sheep, here is the solution. In the words of the founder, Isobel Davies, in her interview to London’s Sunday Times Magazine, “The more successful our clothes are, the more sheep we can save.”

This is because Isobel Davies, former member of the indie band Edith Strategy and now 45, had the idea of starting a label selling knitwear made with wool from sheep rescued from slaughter.

She became a vegetarian at 17 when she first met a vegetarian and discovered that it’s not necessary to eat meat. “From that second,” she says, “I never touched it again.”

The idea for the label Izzy Lane originated when Davies discovered that British farmers were discarding the wool from slaughtered sheep while Britain imports wool from Australia and New Zealand. She thought of using British wool and at the same time saving animals from the meat market.

So, now, whenever they hear of sheep going to be slaughtered, her company Izzy Lane buys them. They buy sheep destined to the abattoir for being male, lame, too old, or having ”blemishes” like black spots.

Her flock of Wensleydale and Shetland sheep is now living happy lives (if not treated like breeding machines, they can live for 15 years or so) in their Sheep Sanctuary. In July, when they shear them, the sheep “are relieved to be rid of their fleeces and seem rejuvenated”, as Davies put it.

Isobel says on her company’s website izzylane.co.uk: “As a longstanding vegetarian I have always been confronted with the argument that sheep would not exist if we didn’t eat them. Izzy Lane hopes to demonstrate an economic model whereby sheep can exist, be valued and have a place in our world without becoming meat. It offers another way.”

Meat workers health problems

Meat is not just bad for the animals slaughtered, of course, and for the humans who consume it. It’s bad for the humans who work in the meat industry too.

Few people realize that, in a country like the USA, meatpacking is the most dangerous occupation.

In the year 2000, about 25 percent of all employees of American meatpacking plants had non-fatal occupational injuries or job-related illnesses: that is as many as 4 times the national average for all private industry sectors.

In addition, serious injuries and illnesses (measured by lost workdays) in the meatpacking sector are almost 5 times the national average in all private industry sectors (14.3 percent versus 3 percent).

The frequency of disorders associated with repeated traumas, mainly back problems and tendinitis, is an astonishing 30 times higher than the private-industry national average. This is the effect produced by the working pace of some modern slaughterhouses, which “process” as many as 400 cattle per hour, and in which some workers make up to 10,000 repetitive knife cuts every day.

So much for the idea that man is a “natural” meat-eater. Meat seems to be associated with diseases and unnatural lifestyles wherever it occurs.

Christmas Anti-Fur Week at Harrods

CAFT (Coalition to Abolish the Fur Trade UK) is organising a fur week of action in the run up to Christmas next week at Harrods, in Knightsbridge, London, Europe's largest department store, and the last one in the UK to still sell real fur.

Harrods has over a million square feet of floor space, and has large amounts of real fur throughout the store, made from a wide variety of animals including fox, beaver, mink, chinchilla, wolf, coyote, rabbit and squirrel.

In recent years, CAFT has successfully campaigned to persuade the few remaining department stores in the UK selling fur, Harvey Nichols, Selfridges and then Liberty, to adopt fur-free policies.

That left Harrods as the only department store selling fur. In October last year CAFT launched the Harrods campaign, and within two months, Harrods went to the High Court to obtain an injunction against CAFT and three named individuals, applying to have the protests moved away from the store.

Anti-Fur activists have been carrying out regular protests outside Harrods.

Now, to persuade Harrods to stop selling fur, the campaign intensifies and there will be protests every day in the week leading up to Christmas, a vital time of the year when the store makes a large proportion of its annual profits.

Whether or not you can make the protests, please politely email, phone, fax, write to Harrods during anti-fur week (see below for details) to request that it takes the compassionate decision to stop the sale of all real animal fur and adopt a fur-free policy. Remember to point out that fur farming is illegal in the UK, so the store should come into line with the wishes of the British public and the democratic will of Parliament.


Harrods Ltd 87-135 Brompton Road
Knightsbridge London SW1X 7XL
Telephone 020 7730 1234
Fax 020 7581 0470
customer.services@harrods.com

Harrods Corporate Service
corporate.service@harrods
+44 (0)20 7225 5843

Other email addresses
Ladies.fashion@harrods.com
service@harrods-casino.com
direct.mail@harrods.com


If you get any replies please forward them to:

CAFT
PO Box 38
Manchester M60 1NX
0845 330 7955
caft@caft.org.uk