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By Wayne Pacelle and Jim Keen
Killing beautiful animals for fur was, since dawn of Homo sapiens , a matter of animal sacrifice for human warmth. Fur-wearing, you could say, was coldly utilitarian.
Over the last few centuries, the fur industry procured its commodity by killing free-roaming wild animals with deadly and indiscriminate body-gripping traps. Within the last century, it added to its supply chain by keeping wild animals as captives and then killing them.
To be sure, throughout the long arc of the Anthropocene, fur always came at the complete expense of the animal, even if there was great practical value in wearing fur. For all of time, there’s no way to get the fur without hurting and killing the animal.
In more contemporary times, furriers traded on the beauty and elegance of the fur while also touting that practical value.
But fur lost its special usefulness within the last century. Human innovation brought us other fabrics to keep us warm, and human creativity allowed designers to weave coats, gloves, and hats that could also please the eye.
Stripped of the key rationale for their enterprise, the furriers, trappers, and fur farmers were reduced to peddling a product for ostentatious display. And when hurting animals isn’t leavened by some noble purpose – such as self-defense, sustenance, or protection from biting wind – it simply becomes cruelty. A dictionary definition of cruelty is “callous indifference to or pleasure in causing pain and suffering.”
A ready alternative ratchets up the quotient of moral responsibility for the end user.
But now, there’s more to the matter of fur farming than cruelty and moral choice. The farming of mink – the primary species used in fur production – is now a biohazard. To put it in stark terms, mink farming, with its proven ability to incubate and spread deadly viruses, threatens human survival.
New Report Underscores Pandemic Threat from Fur Farms
A new report underlines the well-known zoonotic disease risks from farms not only raising mink but also several other animals killed on these production facilities. It underscores that, purely as a matter of self interest, it is time to shut down the mink farms, in every part of the world.
A September 4 paper in the prestigious journal Nature found 125 different viruses in the tissues of 461 fur-farmed mink, raccoon dogs, muskrats, and guinea pigs that were found dead on fur farms in China. This included 36 never-before-seen viruses and 39 viruses at high risk of zoonotic spillover to people or infection cross-over to our domestic animals.
There are an estimated 11,000 fur farms [[link removed]] across Europe, North America, and China. At least 15 species, totaling 85 to 100 million animals per year, are farmed for their pelts across at least 19 countries. However, the North American mink [ Neogale vison ], East Asian raccoon dog [ Nyctereutes procyonoides ], and foxes [ Vulpes vulpe & Alopex lagopus ]), all carnivores, are the most commonly fur-farmed species.
Three-quarters of emerging infectious diseases among humans are zoonotic, with viruses that originate in wild mammals of particular concern (e.g., HIV, Ebola, and SARS). Fur farming of mink, foxes, raccoon dogs, and muskrats essentially places these wild animals under high stress, crowded, and low-welfare and low-sanitation conditions. Workers must then be in close contact with these animals, conducting feeding and other animal husbandry duties. That human-animal intersection is a prescription for zoonotic disease transmission.
The Nature report had these dangerous revelations:
*
Three
influenza
viruses
in
guinea
pig,
mink,
and
muskrat
lungs
*
A
bat
coronavirus
in
mink
lungs
related
to
the
Middle
East
Respiratory
Syndrome
(MERS)
coronavirus
*
Six
additional
coronaviruses
including
an
emergent
canine
coronavirus
in
a
raccoon
dog
*
Known
human
zoonotic
hepatitis
E
and
(often
fatal)
Japanese
encephalitis
viruses
in
guinea
pigs
As the authors stated, “These data also reveal potential virus transmission between farmed animals and wild animals, and from humans to farmed animals, indicating that fur farming represents an important transmission hub for viral zoonoses.”
Mink Farming: Low-Value Commerce, High-Interest Viral Loads
While we don’t know all the details of the scale of China’s fur farm production, we have a general picture of the operations in the United States.
The most recently produced USDA annual review of mink production, released in July, shows that we are taking this risk in the United States for a negligible amount of human commerce. At the U.S. mink industry’s peak in 1966 [[link removed]] when America dominated the global market, 6,000 U.S. mink farmers produced 6.2 million pelts worth about $120 million ($19.35 per pelt average) for American and foreign consumers. In inflation-adjusted dollars, a 1966 U.S. mink pelt was worth $183 and the U.S. mink industry annually generated $1.13 billion in commerce.
The average price per pelt for the 2023 crop year was $34, up from $27.20 in 2022 and the farm-gate value of all U.S. pelts was just $33.1 million – a 10 percent drop from the prior year ($36.6 million) and 83 percent drop in the value of this U.S. enterprise since 2013. Last year was the first year since that mink production dipped below one million animals.
The collapse of supply and demand for mink was accelerated by the massive worldwide SARS-CoV-2 epidemic in farmed mink that paralleled the human COVID-19 pandemic starting in 2020, with outbreaks on at least 450 mink farms in 13 countries in Europe, Canada, and the United States [[link removed]] . Only humans and mink contract the virus in large numbers and can spill it back to other species — with more than 21 million captive mink ( including culling [[link removed]] ) and more than 7 million people [[link removed]] perishing directly as a result of the pandemic.
But as the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic receded, we recognized within the last year an even more ominous threat than COVID-19 mutations. Among the viruses mink can contract and spill over to other species is a deadly form of bird flu. An H5N1 mink mutant strain killed more than 200,000 farmed mink on six farms in Spain and Finland in 2022-23. This bird flu strain has killed 458 of 873 of the people it’s infected — a case fatality rate of 53%, much higher than any known influenza virus, including the infamous 1918 Spanish Flu that killed 50 million people. In short, if it mutates at a mink farm in the U.S. and becomes more transmissible, this new H5N1 strain would become a public health catastrophe of nightmarish proportions.
With the release this month of the Nature study, focused on China’s fur farms, we can now see that mink farms are hosts for a much larger assortment of emerging viruses. The nation that launched the SARS-CoV-2 crisis may be poised to deliver yet one more pandemic. But to be fair, the virus could also easily be launched from a fur farm in Wisconsin or Utah – the two states with the majority of U.S. production.
With their low output of commerce and high output of viral loads, it’s long past due that we take action.
With our active support, Congresswomen Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn., and Nancy Mace, R-S.C., urged the nation to ban mink farms first in 2021 and they quickly built strong support for their legislation. Thanks to them, the House of Representatives passed their amendment in 2022 to ban mink farming.
Unfortunately that effort stalled in the U.S. Senate. But with the findings of the Nature study as a reminder, it’s no time to relent in the political efforts to address the cruelty, negligible commerce, and viral threats built into the marrow of this industry. In this 118th Congress, Mace and DeLauro have renewed their efforts. Their bill, the MINKS Are Superspreaders Act, would end mink farming in the United States.
We know that mink are the only non-human animals who are bilateral transmitters of COVID-19. We also know they are now infected by H5N1 and could spill that far more deadly virus into the human population. And now we know about a variety of other emerging viral threats on mink farms. Yet we continue to house them on factory farms to generate a luxury product that few people want or need.
The MINKS Are Superspreaders Act should be an urgent priority for a nation concerned about the intertwined problems of wildlife exploitation and emerging pandemics. [[link removed]]
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Wayne Pacelle is president of Animal Wellness Action and the Center for a Humane Economy. Jim Keen, DVM, PhD, is director of veterinary sciences for AWA and CHE. Dr. Keen is a former infectious disease researcher with USDA.
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