FURS AND CRUELTY
[To the Editor of the SPECTATOR.] Sin,—As a lover of furs who feels she can no longer reconcile it with her conscience to buy " trapped " skins, I recently visited or wrote to several of the leading West End drapers, hoping to find farmed and humanely killed skins and artificial furs.
Of the five or six I approached, at one only, Messrs. Harvey Nichols, of Knightsbridge, did I find any practical interest in the subject. (Little enough is done even there' at present, but I am told that they hope eventually to be able to show a
much greater range of furs which they can guarantee to be made from animals which are definitely known to have been humanely killed.) By the managers of two other firms I was told that the pelt of an animal not immediately killed being of little value, the trappers in their own interests see that death is instantaneous.
Would that this were actually so. Theoretically there may be something in it ; but I am afraid that those with knowledge of how skins really are obtained say that it is very far from being the case, and that animals caught by a limb in a steel trap, or embedded and torn in a twitch-up snare, may and do live for days before starvation, cold, or the trapper on his rounds puts an end to their agony.
It is earnestly to be hoped that more and more women will come to look with suspicion on what they are told by those whose interest lies in the selling of " trapped " furs.
An assistant in one shop I visited had nothing but hostility for any project that might lessen employment. What—was her argument—were the reputed sufferings of animals (and, of course, they were much exaggerated) to put beside work and food for human beings ? Her anxiety is understandable ; but the answer to her problem surely is that in the farming of furred animals, and in the development of the highly skilled artificial fur trade, lies—in these days when women of nearly all classes wear furs almost as a matter of course—the promise of widespread employment.
For myself, some lines I read recently banished any doubts I might still have had about the rights and wrongs of this question. " As you lie comfortably in bed at night, remember that through the long hours thousands of creatures are moaning and tearing themselves to pieces in steel traps, that you may wrap yourselves in their skins. There are also countless mothers of the wild among these tortured things, whose young are left to starve." How do they strike those women who read them now ?—I am, Sir, &c., [We are glad to print this letter. If more women would follow our correspondent's example, of writing to express her views, their demand for humanely obtained furs would doubtless stimulate the supply.—En. Spectator.]
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