John,
Wild American mink are inquisitive and fiercely territorial animals with large natural ranges. Tragically, captive mink are usually raised in crowded cages on fur farms — which are even more dangerous for people and wildlife than you might think.
Tell Congress to protect public health and wildlife from mink fur farms.
There’s a growing body of science that shows minks’ lung physiology makes the species particularly high-risk for producing and spreading dangerous variants of respiratory diseases to other species including humans.
The crowded cages of mink fur farms are ideal breeding grounds for diseases that worsen COVID and may usher in the next pandemic.
These operations pose serious risks to human health and wildlife. But forward-thinking members of the House of Representatives just introduced a new bill to phase out mink farming, and it needs your support. Tell your representative to support the Mink VIRUS Act to End Mink Farming now.
When humans catch COVID from minks, those strains don't just stay on the fur farm. Infected people can, and have, spread mink-specific strains of the disease into their communities. The same goes for minks who catch COVID from humans. Confined minks are notorious escape artists, and COVID-infected minks have escaped and spread the disease to animals in the wild.
And it’s not just COVID. Minks have also spread highly pathogenic avian influenza (H5N1) — a disease that recently killed 21 highly endangered California condors — among confined mink populations after contracting the disease from wild birds.
We can't let mink-farming operations spread disease into the wild for the sake of an outdated, dwindling industry that churns out pelts for luxury markets. We need to overwhelm the House of Representatives with support for phasing them out. Can you ask your representative to support this groundbreaking bill now?
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