ever wonder where fur coats come from?

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Animals raised to become someone’s fur coat spend their days exposed to the elements in row after row of barren, tiny, urine- and feces-encrusted cages. Investigations have found animals with gruesome injuries going without medical care and foxes and minks pacing in endless circles, crazy from the confinement.



Minks, foxes, chinchillas, raccoons, and other animals on fur farms spend their entire lives confined to tiny, filthy cages, constantly circling and pacing back and forth from stress and boredom, some animals even self-mutilating or cannibalizing cagemates. Foxes are kept in cages measuring only 2.5 feet square, with one to four animals per cage. Minks and other species are generally kept in cages only 1 foot by 3 feet, again with up to four animals per cage. The cramped and overcrowded conditions are especially distressing to solitary animals, like minks.



During the summer, hundreds of thousands of animals endure searing heat and suffer from dizziness and vomiting before dying of heat exhaustion. Baby animals are the most common victims, as they succumb faster to dehydration. In the winter, caged animals have nowhere to seek refuge from freezing temperatures, rain, sleet, and snow.



No federal law protects animals on fur farms. Farmers often kill animals by anal or genital electrocution, which causes them to experience the intense pain of a heart attack while fully conscious. Other killing methods include neck-breaking and suffocation. Sometimes animals are only stunned and are then skinned alive.



Genital Electrocution: A Real-Life Shock-Horror Story



Row after row of tiny wire-mesh cages, stacked four high and about 25 in a row, chinchillas peering watchfully through the wires, a rack of pelts hanging on a far wall, and except for a radio playing softly in one corner of the room, a morgue-like hush. That’s the scene that two PETA investigators found at a fur "factory" farm secluded in a quiet, snow-covered town in Michigan. PETA’s Research & Investigations Department sent two undercover teams into fur "farms" in five states. Our investigators witnessed not only how animals live, but also how they die in the seedy world of fur farming. One method they documented had never been made public before: genital electrocution.



Little Animals, Big Suffering



During genital electrocution, the killer attaches an alligator clamp to the animal’s ear and another to her labia and flips a switch, or plugs the wire into the wall socket, sending a jolt of electricity through her skin down the length of her body. She jerks and stiffens. But, according to biologist Leslie Gerstenfeld-Press, although the electrical current stops the heart, it does not kill her: In many cases, the animal remains conscious. The electrical current causes unbearable muscle pain, at the same time working as a paralyzing agent, preventing the victim from screaming or fighting. A chinchilla farmer who uses genital electrocution told our investigators that he leave the clips on "for one or two minutes" to make sure the heart doesn’t start up again but that sometimes animals revive and those who do remember the pain. In front of our investigators, one rancher unplugged the animal, listened to the heart and said, "Nope, still beating," and plugged the cables back in for another 30 seconds.



Not Killing Them Softly



As one farmer observed, "Sometimes you’ll get one that’ll argue with you." The chinchillas, like all animals, do not go willingly; although they make no noise as they wait—held upside down as the rancher attaches the clips—their whiskers and mouths tremble constantly until the electrical charge freezes all movement. For the benefit of our investigators, the farmer laid the animal’s body on a table, although normally, he said, he would just hang the animal by the tail from a clip.



For small animals, neck "snapping" or "popping" is easy and cheap. The owner of one farm that PETA visited wraps the fingers of one hand around the neck of the chinchilla, grasps the lower body with the other hand and jerks the animal’s vertebra out of the socket, breaking the neck. Neck-snapping takes just a second, but for "about five minutes" afterward, according to one rancher, the animal jerks and twitches. It might take two minutes for an animal to become brain-dead from cervical dislocation; in the meantime, as shown in our investigator’s video, she or he kicks and struggles.



No federal law regulates the killing of animals raised for fur. The methods vary from one company to another, but all emphasize concern for the pelt, not for the animal. It takes at least 100 chinchilla pelts to make just one full-length coat.



Animals like raccoons and foxes caught in steel-jaw leghold traps—the most widely used trap—endure excruciating pain from the steel bars clamped onto their legs, paws, and bodies. Some animals, especially mothers desperate to return to their young, will struggle to get loose, even chewing or twisting off their own legs to escape. Animals suffer for hours or even days in traps before trappers arrive to stomp on their chests or break their necks. The trapped animal is left to suffer blood loss, infection, gangrene, exhaustion, exposure, frostbite, shock, or attack by nonhuman predators. Other animals, such as beavers and muskrats, caught in underwater traps can struggle for up to 20 minutes before drowning. Every year, traps also cripple and kill hundreds of thousands of dogs, cats, birds, and other animals—including endangered species—who are caught by mistake.



The "Farm"



The wire cages are tiny, filthy, and encrusted with dirt, clumps of fur, and excrement. Locked inside each one is a fox, imprisoned here since birth. Many of the foxes live for years in these hideous conditions before the farmer kills them and sells their fur to make coats, cuffs, collars, and trim.



The farmer told our investigator that a humane death by an injection of barbiturate was "too expensive"—even though it costs a mere 30 cents per animal. So he uses a metal noose pole to lift each fox from the cage by the neck, shoves an electric prod into the animal’s rectum and forces a metal conductor into the animal’s mouth. A flip of a switch shoots 240 volts of electricity through the fox’s body.



According to our investigator, "The fox’s eyes usually shut and the body goes rigid. There is a crackling sound … and sometimes teeth break and fall out. … Often the anal probe falls out. When this happens, the fox convulses, shakes, and often cries."



Death doesn’t come quickly. Because the electricity does not go through and stun the brain, the foxes remain awake and feel the full excruciating force of a massive heart attack. Tom Amlung, a veterinarian and administrator for St. Clair County, Ill., animal control, says, "The animals do not lose consciousness … for one to two minutes. The time … seems like an eternity, so one can only imagine how the animal must feel experiencing this pain during this time with the electricity running from one end of his body to the other while heat builds up at the site of the electrode."



The Lab Link



The foxes were fed cast-off chickens sent by a pharmaceutical company. The chickens, who have already suffered at the hands of experimenters, arrive by the thousands, their little hunched-over bodies shoved into sealed cardboard boxes without food, water, or space to move. Our investigator documented the farmer stacking the boxes upside down in a corner of his barn and covering them with a plastic tarp to slowly suffocate the chickens. For hours, the chickens could be heard trying to escape. When the farmer cut open the boxes and pulled them out, some were still alive.



"The farmer forced the live chickens feet first into the grinder," recorded our investigator, "while they were conscious, fighting, squawking, and flapping for their lives. You could hear their screams over the roar of the engine. He would sometimes get a smirk on his face when the chickens’ final protests were cut short."



The "Secret" Ingredient



To glean even more profit, the farmer collects and sells the foxes’ urine. The bottled waste is sold to hunters who use it to mask their scent while they lie in wait for deer. The farmer also buys live deer and raccoons so that he can collect and sell their urine to hunt shops. The wild deer are terrified of humans and have never known confinement. The raccoons are crammed together in small cages. When a young buck caught his hoof in the wire-mesh floor of his cage, our investigator saw the farmer attempt to free him by cutting the fully conscious deer’s leg, rather than the wire, with a razor-sharp knife, severing the hoof. Hoping to salvage his investment, the farmer then threw the bleeding deer into the trunk of his car and drove to a veterinarian. When the vet advised him to destroy the buck, he shot the wounded animal with a .22-caliber rifle, because "bullets are cheaper than injections."











Fur has fallen so far from grace that furriers are now trying to convince consumers that pelts are “eco-friendly.” But nothing could be further from the truth! Furs are loaded with chemicals to keep them from decomposing in the buyer’s closet, and fur production pollutes the environment and gobbles up precious resources. And don’t forget: Unlike faux fur, the “real thing” causes millions of animals to suffer every single year.



Fur Is Eco-Unfriendly

Did you know that more than 60 times as much energy is needed to produce fur coats from ranch-raised animals than is needed to produce fake furs? And that’s just the beginning.



The waste produced on fur farms—where animals spend their entire lives in cramped, filthy cages, constantly pacing back and forth from stress and boredom—is poisoning our waterways. In December 1999, for example, the Washington Department of Ecology fined one mink farmer $24,000 for polluting ditches that drain into a local creek.



The Environmental Protection Agency has also filed complaints against companies involved in fur production and transportation for illegally generating and disposing of hazardous waste from processing pelts. Improper handling of waste can cause water contamination. The fur industry has even lobbied governments in the Great Lakes area to maintain low water-quality standards—so that fur farms won’t be identified as major polluters.



Furriers claims that the carcasses from animals skinned for their pelts are used for animal feed (even though many animals on fur farms are killed by being injected with poisons), but often they end up dumped in landfills. A fur farm in Great Britain was accused of violating waste-disposal laws after a local resident found skinned mink carcasses in a landfill there. Although wasteful, this method of disposal would not be illegal in the United States.



Trapping—and “Trashing”—Wildlife

Approximately 30 percent of the fur sold in the U.S. comes from animals trapped in the wild. As anyone who stops to think about it will quickly realize, traps are indiscriminate: They catch any animal unfortunate enough to stumble upon them. Every year, hundreds of thousands of dogs, cats, birds, and other animals—including endangered species—are “accidentally” crippled or killed by traps. Trappers call these animals “trash kills” because they have no economic value, and most are simply discarded like garbage. Animals who survive and are released often die later from their injuries.