Faux Fur Follies?
Much like the lyrics of the 1990s song, Jim Armstrong often encounters things that make him go “Hmmm.”
Faux fur is one of them. Christmas shopping in Birmingham with his wife last year, Armstrong, an Alabama Cooperative Extension System wildlife specialist and Auburn University professor of forestry and wildlife sciences, noticed a display of leather vests with lining advertised as coyote fur.
But on closer inspection, he noticed it wasn’t coyote fur at all. It wasn’t even real fur. The label stated “faux fur/coyote.” And faux, incidentally, is not an alternative spelling for fox.
Like all faux fur products, the synthetic material had undergone a series of dying to make it look like coyote fur.
For his part, Armstrong always has considered the growing clamor in some quarters for synthetic fur as self-defeating because of the added strain it places on the environment.
These items, like other kinds of synthetic products, are at least partly made from nonrenewable sources, he says. And as politically incorrect as the idea may seem to some people, Armstrong wonders why people just don’t stick with natural fur, a renewable resource.
“Yes, that particular raccoon or coyote obviously will die for this fur, but next year, there will be more coyotes and raccoons running around,” he says.
“On the other hand, each time we tap into a nonrenewable resource, such as petroleum, we’re whittling it away.”
Yes, to some it undoubtedly sounds coldhearted — Armstrong admits that. But he says many natural fur critics overlook one other hard fact. Coyotes, raccoons and other wild animals used for fur don’t have pension funds, assisted living and retirement centers as we humans do — a point he often drives home to students in his wildlife classes.
Unless these animals are hit by a car or are shot, most die slow, agonizing deaths as the physical effects of aging undermine their ability to compete with other animals for scarce food resources, Armstrong says.
“Unless that these animals die a quick death, they’re going to die a very slow death as their teeth wear down and as they become less adept at foraging and at warding off other predators,” he says.
And if the threat of death from a predator isn’t bad enough, these aging animals also lack the ability to ward off parasites and bacteria, which often inflict even more hideous suffering.
To illustrate this, Armstrong often shares a picture with his students of a coyote showing all of the physical effects of decline — a physical wretch, consumed in mange, his shoulders stooped and legs buckling with the effects of aging.
Given this bitter fact of life, Armstrong wonders why so many people consider it inhumane to harvest these animals for fur.
Whatever the case, Armstrong says the growing presence of faux fur products at shopping malls likely will continue to elicit his usual response — Hmmm.
Posted by Jim Langcuster at April 11, 2008 03:13 PM