͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌To prevent cruelty to animals, we promote enacting and enforcing good public policies. To enact good laws, we must elect good lawmakers, and that’s why we remind voters which candidates care about our issues and which ones don’t. If you’d like to unsubscribe, click here. [[link removed]]

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Mink Farming Couldn’t Be More Reckless or Cruel
A collapsing fur farming industry brings negligible economic benefits but very consequential health threats
By Wayne Pacelle and Jim Keen, DVM, PhD
On December 1, Poland’s President Karol Nawrocki signed a law phasing out fur farming, making his country the 23rd of the 28 European Union member states to abolish the industry. This was a major step toward ending the mink fur trade worldwide, because Poland is currently the second largest fur-farming nation in the world, after China.
There are now fewer than a half-dozen nations in the EU that still engage in mink farming and other forms of fur farming. And in those remaining nations, fur production has declined by at least 50% since the wave of COVID-19 outbreaks at mink farms in 2019.
Yesterday, U.S. Reps. Vern Buchanan, R-Fla., and Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn., introduced H.R. 6513 [[link removed]] , the MINKS are Superspreaders Act, to end mink farming in the United States. DeLauro introduced a similar bill in 2021, which passed in the House before it stalled in the Senate.
Since the work of Stone Age humans, killing beautiful animals for fur was a necessity for surviving the elements. 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 steel traps and snares. Within the last century, we added factory farming of mink and other furbearers as a way of building the pelt count.
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 ready alternative ratchets up the quotient of moral responsibility for the end user.
New Research Underscores Pandemic Threat from Fur Farms
In an era of enhanced understanding of zoonotic disease, 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.
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.
Even with the precipitous decline in production, there are still at least 15 species 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 vulpes and Alopex lagopus ] are the most commonly fur-farmed species.
Recent reports by our scientific team underline 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 human self-interest, it is time to shut down the mink farms, in every part of the world.
“These operations fueled dangerous disease transmission during the COVID-19 pandemic and continue to pose a major risk to families and frontline workers,” said Rep. Buchanan in introducing the legislation. Rep. DeLauro seconded the point: “Mink operations can incubate and spread new disease variants, and unsanitary and overcrowded cages create a perfect storm for public health threats.”
A September 2024 peer-reviewed article in the 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 with high risk of zoonotic spillover to people or infection cross-over to our domestic animals.
The Nature report presented 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.”
U.S. Mink Farming: Low-Value Commerce, High-Interest Viral Loads
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 in 2023 was $36, up from $27.20 in 2022, and the farm-gate value of fewer than a million U.S. pelts taken from the mink was just $28.1 million—a 15% drop from the prior year and an 87% drop in the value of this U.S. enterprise since 2013. This is an industry in free fall.
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 [[link removed]] on at least 450 mink farms in 13 countries in Europe, Canada, and the United States. 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 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 the 873 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 United States 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 farm in Wisconsin or Utah—the two states with the most mink fur production.
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 accept the public health risks of housing them in factory farms to produce a luxury product chiefly for export to elites overseas.
Please tell your lawmakers to support the MINKS Are Superspreaders Act—a necessary tool to address the intertwined problems of wildlife exploitation and emerging pandemics. [[link removed]]

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Wayne Pacelle, president of the Center for a Humane Economy & Animal Wellness Action, is the author of two New York Times bestselling books, “The Bond” and “The Humane Economy.”
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