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The importance of fur-wearing, apart from the lives of up to 40 million animals killed for fur each year, is that after meat-eating it is the most visibly conspicuous public symbol of attitudes toward animals. Mass media and the general public began to view animal advocacy as an authentic socially transformative force after fur garments abruptly vanished from the streets of much of the U.S. and Europe in 1988-1989--and perceive the cause as waning if they see more fur, whether or not fur is actually the focus of much active campaigning.
Today more fur is visible, and that should be cause for worry. U.S. retail fur sales fell from a high of $1.85 billion in 1987-1988 to $950 million in 1991-1992. In 2000 and 2001, sales recovered to $1.69 billion, then dipped to $1.53 billion. Adjusted for inflation, the real increase from the low point to the recent high was barely 20%, and the trend is apparently again downward, but perhaps mostly because of two years of economic recession.
British retail fur sales fell farther, faster, and sooner, from £80 million in 1984 to £11 million in 1989, bringing the closure of 175 of the then-200 British retail fur stores. Yet the British Fur Trade Association claimed a 35% sales increase in 2000-2001.
French fur sales plummeted 70% from 1990 to 1995, but then rose to 61% of the 1990 level in 2001. In the European Union as a whole, fur sales were reported up 13.6% in 2001. Globally, according to the International Fur Trade Federation, sales jumped 7%, to $9.5 billion.
U.S. ranched mink production is still in a decade-long slide. Britain and Scotland actually banned mink ranching in 2002, but world ranched mink production, down to 20.4 million pelts in 1994, has risen again to 30.8 million pelts in 2002. The British and American fur sales collapses in the late 1980s, with a similar slide in The Netherlands, represented the most obvious successes to date of the pro-animal message. Falling meat consumption among each younger age group may be still more indicative of enduring progress, and killing in U.S. animal shelters has fallen even more steeply than fur sales, but meat products are usually processed so as to no longer resemble animals, while shelter killing occurs behind closed doors. Fur, by contrast, is most often plainly of animal origin, and is worn to be seen, as an intended display of status.
When fur was no longer seen often in status-conscious places, the absence of it signified that caring about animals now conveyed more status and won more admiration and approval than the ruthless arrogance toward other beings that fur-wearing has symbolized at least since the fur-clad hordes of Attila the Hun ravaged Europe in 450-452, raping and killing almost every human they found, and eating almost every animal. Though dictionaries link the term "barbarian" to facial hair, the Huns had little or no facial hair. They were stopped by an almost unprecedented alliance of bearded and nonbearded peoples who had clothing and banners of woven cloth in common. Not exactly apostles of nonviolence themselves, and certainly not animal advocates, they nonetheless agreed that their civilizations were imperiled by the Hun disregard for both human life and the lives of the cattle and work animals who were essential to the European economy.
Dressing like a Hun returned to vogue centuries later with the Vikings, and again when furs became the preferred costumes of the likes of Ivan the Terrible and the serial wife-killer Henry the Eighth.
Fur-wearers have tried to maintain a somewhat more mannered image in recent centuries. Yet the spectre of Attila remains evident, and the risk still exists that if fur-wearing is not confronted where it remains in fashion, fur-clad hordes may once again surge into Europe--and this time, the U.S.
It is not surprising that fur-wearing is ubiquitous this winter in corruption-plagued Kiev and Moscow, as ANIMAL PEOPLE recently observed first-hand. Low pelt prices in recent years, reflecting the success of anti-fur activism elsewhere, have brought fur within the grasp of those who coveted it but could not afford much of it during the years of Communist and post-Communist deprivation.
The challenge to animal advocates in the former Soviet Union is to ensure that this response to repressed demand exhausts itself rapidly and subsides into shame, as the reality of fur is made more evident than whatever the wearers think they get from buying it. The challenge to animal advocates elsewhere is to keep the shame of fur visible. ANIMAL PEOPLE was appalled, after visiting Kiev and Moscow, to find fur displayed even more ubiquitously in shop windows in Geneva, Switzerland, without evident trace of opposition.
This may reflect the paradox that Geneva commemorates the local founding of countless humanitarian organizations with prominent monuments, yet is affluent in part through providing secret bank service to foreign dictators and criminals. Street-level activism is not a strong tradition in Geneva, nor in Kiev, nor Moscow, nor in most of the cities where cold winters allow the pretense that fur is needed for warmth. Yet the absence of the street-level activism which accompanied the decline of fur sales in the U.S., Britain, and The Netherlands during the 1980s is in itself a reminder that the fur issue, perhaps more than any other animal advocacy cause, requires the sustained presence of "troops on the ground." Pushing fur out of vogue requires an effort similar to the drive to stamp out smoking in public places in the U.S. Those who commit the offensive acts must encounter omnipresent reminders that what they are doing is disgusting to a majority of the people around them. Tabling, leafleting, and solitary vigils with picket signs were the tactics that built the success of the anti-fur movement in the 1980s, serving a purpose similar to that of the "no smoking" signs now seen throughout the U.S. Momentum was lost when the organizational impetus behind omnipresent small demonstrations was usurped by mostly unsuccessful attempts to win TV attention with mass rallies--because mass rallies are more easily avoided than handfuls of protesters who may be almost anywhere at any time.
Anti-fur tactical lessons
ANIMAL PEOPLE newswire monitor Cathy Czapla found only three "Fur Free Friday" features in major U.S. newspapers during late November 2002, the fewest ever. Yet Internet postings, letters to major news media, and correspondence directed to ANIMAL PEOPLE all indicate that opposition to fur among individual activists is no less intense now than ever. Indeed, anti-fur views may now be stronger among today's young activists, who are much less likely these days to have grown up with fur-wearing parents or grandparents, or to have ever worn fur themselves.
What they lack, to revitalize the anti-fur movement in the U.S. and Europe, is first-hand experience in waging successful anti-fur campaigns. Young activists today can barely remember the tactics that worked in the late 1980s. More accessible on the Internet is information about efforts which accomplished little or nothing in the 1990s.
There were, and are, people who would rather go naked than wear fur, whose exhibitionism--as Coalition Against the Fur Trade founder J.P. Goodwin eventually pointed out--tends to attract attention without furthering the message. The effort, though well-meaning and brave, invites dismissal rather than emulation.
There were the Animal Liberation Front mink releases, vandalism, arsons, and pipebombings at fur farms and fur stores, which also still occasionally occur. These acts may have done more to discourage law-abiding activists from pursuing anti-fur campaigns, lest they be identified with illegality and violence, than they accomplished to economically harm the fur industry. There was the use of hired celebrity spokespersons, which backfired when the fur industry paid some of them more to become literal turncoats. There was also the great false hope that the European Union might eventually implement a ban on imports of trapped fur which for some years existed on paper and was lauded as a victory, but was dismantled by U.S., Canadian, and Russian governmental pressure before preventing the sale of even one trapped pelt. Finally, there have been ballot initiatives to ban commercial fur-trapping and/or the use of leghold traps. These have mostly succeeded with voters, yet with enough exemptions to enable serious trappers to go right on trapping, now in the name of nuisance wildlife control.
A self-defeating aspect of the campaigns focused on trapped fur is that they erroneously convey the message that wearing ranched fur is less objectionable--although the animals ranched for fur suffer misery throughout their lives, not just at the painful end. Common to all of these ineffective campaign approaches is the pursuit of shortcuts, instead of taking the message directly to consumers in a sustained, focused manner. Fur-wearing will end not when protests get TV time, nor when the fur industry pays higher insurance premiums, nor when any particular capturing or killing technique is outlawed, but rather when informed individuals choose to avoid fur, including garments with a small amount of fur trim. Expediting that day, whether in Kiev, Moscow, New York, Chicago, Amsterdam, or London, requires one-to-one communication.
As ever, the time-consuming hard work must be done by local activists, who must also manage to remain cheerful and attractive despite the difficulties and frustrations of campaigning outdoors in the winter. If people who wish to be attractive and influential also wish to be like the anti-fur campaigners they encounter, the anti-fur movement will grow; if not, it will be tuned out.
Well-funded national and international organizations can do three things to help local campaigners maintain their spirits and be more effective: 1) Antifur literature must be kept up-to-date, and must be distributed to local activists without charge. Some national organizations rationalize charging for literature by asserting that this keeps furriers from ordering and dumping materials, but it should not be terribly difficult to distinguish authentic activists from saboteurs. 2) Paid anti-fur advertisements must be prominently placed in all affordable media. If TV time is too expensive, some of the same audience may be reached through printed television program guides. If daily newspapers are too expensive, try weeklies. The more people see the anti-fur message, the more effective it will be--and although the anti-fur message in mass media will not convert directly into cash donations, as it does in direct mailings to confirmed supporters, greater campaign success and organizational prominence will bring more financial success later. 3) Almost every other cause long since discovered the importance of providing "strike pay" to the people who staff the tables and carry the picket signs.
"Strike pay," usually barely exceeding the minimum wage, is not lucrative enough to attract people who are not already committed to the cause, but does enable students and older people on fixed incomes to put in more hours doing the work that needs to be done, instead of taking menial jobs at unrelated tasks to help make ends meet.
Organizers in other causes long since learned that donors who have no free time for tabling and picketing will cheerfully pay other dedicated activists to do it--so why is this not being done in animal defense? Individual activists and donors meanwhile need to remind the organizations they support, as well as the people they meet and the stores they patronize, that opposition to fur is a priority. Clothiers who stock fur-trimmed items of any sort need to get polite complaints. People who wear fur, even fur trim, must be reminded that it is offensive, which can be done as discreetly as quietly discussing fur within their hearing. There are countless ways to effectively convey the message, person to person, in an effective manner. Anyone can find a way that works for her, or him. Whether or not the big groups demonstrate leadership, it must be done.
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