This
is as delivered December 1999. Watch out for end notes (encoded in the body
of the Word text); and for the references;
and for the appendices
Fur
and Freedom: a defence of the fur trade
By
Chapter
One The fur trade: cruel and unnecessary?
Chapter
Three: The Authorities
During
the past year I have been funded by the British Fur Trade Association to pursue
an information project. The funding equated to about three months' working
time. The idea originated with me and the agenda was determined far more by me
than by the trade. I am grateful to the association for the open-minded
attitude its members brought to a project whose main characteristic was that I
made up my own mind what I thought and said. I have been honoured to ally
myself with the trade and aim to continue to speak my mind about it.
This pamphlet, whose writing was
funded by the IEA, is part of the fruit of the BFTA research funding. This past
year or so I have worked quite closely on various projects with Roger Bate and
Julian Morris of the IEA and feel great admiration for the dynamism, rigour and
enterprise they bring to promoting serious, often counter-intuitive, thinking
about "green" issues, which are so often riddled with political
correctness and humbug.
Many academics and others have been
generous with their time. I hope I have understood and transmitted their
insights and evidence.
It
has been a surprisingly good year for the British fur trade, and it is one that
has ended a surprisingly good decade for this most disparaged of businesses.
It's true that some of the most
obvious signs were and remain the reverse of cheerful. In November, the
monarch, wearing a stunning designer fur coat, arrived in Parliament to deliver
the Queen's speech in which she announced her Government's determination to
introduce legislation banning fur farming.
If enacted, the bill will deliver a New Labour manifesto commitment
which had earlier in the year had backbench championing. In January 1999, Maria
Eagle, the Labour MP, introduced her private member's bill which sought to ban
the farming of fur in
Extraordinarily, Elliot Morley, the
Countryside Minister, now uses the grounds of "public morality" to
defend the proposed ban. This language is new, and seems necessary mostly
because there are few serious justifications for picking out fur farming as
particularly bad except perhaps that large numbers of people profess themselves
opposed to it. In other words, public "morality" is now synonymous
with public "opinion". We will be looking at the some of the obvious
differences between the two. Anyway, ministers have elevated public opinion,
however ill-informed, inflamed by media outpourings or transient, into what
passes in a febrile age for ethical principle.
On the face of it, the prospect of a ban is bad news for the
trade and good news for animals. In reality, as we shall see, it is neither. A
ban would, however, surely be bad news for freedom, for good sense, and for
fair play.
Indeed, very interesting aspects
of the way modern societies work and think are on display as we watch events
surrounding the fur trade. Such study is a wonderful opportunity to watch
double-think, moral triviality, grandstanding and humbug at work on issues
ranging from animal welfare through to thinking about the rich.
Maria Eagle's bill produced one
major effect she may not have desired: the second sustained media discussion
which allowed the possibility that a ban of fur farming might be an oppressive
use of the law (the first followed the release of mink from farms in August and
September 1998, see below).
There are of course profound animal welfare issues in the
use of fur, as there are in any other animal use. Few consumers of bacon
sandwiches would consider their activity to be as morally problematic as
wearing fur, and yet there are close parallels between them. A discussion of
these issues will make up the second, animal welfare, part of what follows, as
Chapter Two.
But we
begin with the human side of the issue, in Chapter One. The fur trade has long
been subject to pressure from its opponents, who protest in various ways. Some
assert, and respect, the right to protest in a more or less dignified and very
public way. Some protesters noisily harangue the customers and staff of fur
shops, whilst others go so far as to harass them. Others take the battle to the
homes of anyone associated with the fur trade, and there the harassment takes
on a new seriousness.
Much of this sort of protest looks like the entirely
laudable if uncomfortable process of a vigorous democracy. Some of it is
exactly that, and attracts a good deal of tacit public support. We need,
though, to look at the issue in a rather more sceptical way than is common, and
an attempt to do so will make up the section on public opinion and protest that
follows.
Some protesters undertake direct action against fur farms,
most famously in the summer of 1998 when they released mink into the wild.
Because the releases brought about the first positive press coverage the fur
trade had received for years, we will look at these in this chapter as we widen
discussion to cover the media.
This is where we will also look at the remarkable revival of
the fortunes of the fur trade in recent years. Long castigated as a "dying
trade" by its enemies, it is actually flourishing.[3] It is
clearly a "luxury" trade, and as such is a bell-whether of the
world's economy, and especially of the emerging economies which provide large
quantities of nouveaux riches seeking
extravagant expression of their new found wealth. The trade's opponents seem to
dislike it precisely because it thrives when the rich thrive, and they suppose
that it only satisfies desires which only the rich can indulge. We will look at
this latter premise and prejudice and discover it be flawed. This will be the
right moment to defend extravagance for its own sake.
Public attitudes are
not quite what the protesters might hope, and even the media is getting around
to producing better coverage of the fur trade. But even if it cannot hope that
protest will go away or even much diminish, the fur trade is within its rights
to hope that it will be offered a decent level of protection from the hard core
activists, first of all in law and then in the courts and on the ground. This
area, policing freedom, is full of dilemmas. Since the courts and police
operate only under licence from parliament, this is where we come full circle,
in Chapter Three, where we discuss how governments and the authorities respond
to these issues, and how they ought to. What is the politicians' obligation to
the protesters, customers and traders, and the animals, we will by then have
discussed in some detail?
Chapter One The
fur trade: cruel and unnecessary?
Anyone
associated with the fur trade knows that they are in a business which it is
hardly polite to mention. The response of the majority of people on meeting a
furrier is often a sort of shock that they have actually come across such a
pariah. Many people are used to hearing or even mouthing opposition to the
trade, and to hearing or mouthing vague support for all the famous and
attractive people who declare themselves its enemies. Actually to meet the
object of all this dislike is a little surprising.
But
something else happens too. People go on to say they don't approve of violent
protest, and - almost by the way - women often add what fun it was when one
could wear one's furs, and are such times really dead and gone?
It
is, by the way, not merely the elderly or rich who now remember wearing fur:
there is a generation of middle aged women of all sorts who wore fur in the 60s
and 70s, often buying it in junk or charity shops, or inheriting from
grandmothers and mothers.
Still, it is often a surprise for people to
meet someone working in or supporting the trade. It is as though one had said
one was an undertaker, or a slaughterhouse worker, even a paedophile. It would
be better to say that one was a burglar than to admit to being a furrier. Now
obviously these are all different cases. An undertaker gives people the creeps,
though we know the job is respectable. A slaughterhouse worker is somehow more
shocking, as though only a callous person could do such work, though such
workers are thought to be somehow blamelessly manual. A paedophile would be
disdained as a pervert as well as a criminal, but at least has the merit of
being ill. A burglar might even be thought to have a certain glamour: think how
celebrities courted the gang bosses of the Sixties.
So how to get the heart of the
special dislike of the fur trade? The best image is that of Cruella Deville,
the witchlike bitch queen in Walt Disney's 101 Dalmations. She has a monstrous
love of glamour, and a mighty disdain for the suffering she causes as she
achieves it. She is, after all, the Devil. She has the same element of the
joyously diabolical as we find in the Absolutely Fabulous females: we know they
are atrocious, but we hope they win over more boringly scrupulous types.
Cruella has the best lines in her movie, too.
There is assumed to be an element of torture in the fur
trade, Cruella's own, of course, which is not present in most other uses of
animals. The same sort of hatred does attach, however, to vivisectionists, as
people who use animals in any way in experiments are still called, though few
actually cut into their animals, or indeed inflict serious pain. They are
somehow assumed to be heartless men in pursuit of heartless science, or
validation - more trivially - of unnecessary cosmetics.
But the Cruella image might seem well applied to furriers
because their trade is perceived to deal to an extraordinary degree in waste
and luxury. Maria Eagle caught this sense exactly in her bill which sought to
ban fur farming. It emphasised the cruelty of the production methods on the one
hand, but it pointedly juxtaposed the extravagance of the final product on the
other. It aimed, she told the House of Commons on the first day of debate on her
Fur Farming (Prohibition) Bill to outlaw "the cruel exploitation of
essentially wild animals for what is an inessential luxury item."
[Telegraph, 1999b] This interlocking of elements was felt to be a killer blow:
one might justify suffering which was caused by necessity and one might justify
luxury which did not involve suffering. But causing suffering just for luxury
was clearly doubly wrong. It was also a situation unique to the fur trade, and
expressed the uniqueness of the wrong done by the trade.
The
same simplicity could not be applied, for instance, to vivisection, which comes
bundled with different degrees of usefulness, and indeed is now more or less
outlawed for cosmetic purposes.
Now to unpick some of this. It is
clearly the case that people are within their rights to believe that man's use
of animals is not justified by any human purpose. The animal rights case, in
most of its forms, depends crucially on reminding ourselves that in the wild,
"nature" has ordained what happens to animals, and however awful that
may be, at least humans may say that it is no fault of theirs. Provided humans
stand back from nature, none of the suffering of animals is a moral charge on
people.
The more "hard-line" an
animal rights case is being made, the less the usefulness or extravagance of
the outcome matters. A hard-line animal rights view no more attacks useful
animal experimentation than trivial experimentation. The human outcome is not
in issue: the animal impact is. From a strict animal rightist point of view, it
should make no difference the purpose for which an animal died. Such a view
dislikes the way high human purposes might be put into the balance against
animal suffering. The animal's supposed right is to non-interference, not
merely to have its interests weighed in the balance.
Most
of the serious (and dangerous) protesters against the fur trade are Vegan. That
is: they believe no animal consumption by humans can be justified. The
"hard" Vegan case does not discriminate between food for the hungry,
say, or pigs killed for bacon sandwiches for the overweight. It just says man
shouldn't kill animals for food.
There is of course ordinary merit in views much less extreme
than this. Many of us distinguish between the human benefit derived from
different forms of animal suffering. If there came to be a choice between using
animals in research and using them in coats, most of us would prefer to defend
the former, even if the former caused more suffering.
Whether one is against vivisection or merely against eating
animals, such positions are capable of logical defence, have emotional appeal
and may even be sensible.
The
right to hold this sort of opinion is not in question. Arguably, it is the most
noble sort of opinion about animals a person can hold. But many arguments which
sought to defend the interests of animals would not by themselves stigmatise
the fur-trade any more than they stigmatised the keeping of pigs for bacon, of
cows for milk, the hunting of fox for fun and conservation, or the hunting of deer,
or any other use.
The harder the animal rights case a person puts, the less
can that person sensibly stigmatise the fur trade for the luxury of the
outcome. Most animal production is undertaken for human pleasure, not human
need. It makes no more sense to shout at a furrier than to shout at a butcher.
It's just easier, and easier to get away with it in a society which doesn't
care to think about such things. This is not the place to argue the legitimacy
of man’s treatment of animals. [Scruton, 1996] It is only necessary here to
argue that the fur trade has no harder a case to argue than any other trade
using animal products.
Maria
Eagle's bill argued that in the special case of fur, the suffering of animals
is compounded by the lack of need for the products which result. This argument
appeals to people who attempt to discriminate between the purposes for which
animals suffer and die. It shouldn't make much difference to the hard-liners
who most cared for Ms Eagle's bill, and is in any case deeply flawed in the
case of fur.
To
stigmatise the fur trade efficiently, one would ideally need to demonstrate
that it caused more suffering to animals than the other practices one
stigmatised less, or prove that it was so egregiously, exceptionally,
grievously extravagant that though it caused little suffering it could not be
condoned.
Chapter
Two will deal with the issue of animal suffering and suggests that it is
surprisingly small in the case of producing fur. One might bend over backwards
and concede for the purposes of argument that mink and pig are on a par when it
comes to the degree of their suffering or otherwise on farms. But what is as
interesting is that it is the very arguments of vegetarianism and Veganism
which help us see that the fur trade is really no more unnecessary than is the
production of meat, milk or any other animal product. Marie Eagle's
"luxury" argument limps even more dramatically than does her
"welfare" argument.
It
is demonstrably true that western man has no need of animal produce. We can eat
a Vegan diet without suffering. Indeed if the world fed less of its plant
material to animals for human consumption, it would theoretically better
support a large human population. [Leach, 1976] There is even a case to be made
that Westerners not only do not need to eat animal produce, but that they need
to eat less of it. This is to say that over-consumption of animal produce
shortens or worsens our lives. So one might say that a good deal of whatever
suffering is involved in animal farming is not merely not useful to man, but
produces human as well as animal suffering.
Maria
Eagle's bill invoked a calculus of animal suffering versus human benefit, and
supposed quite wrongly that it caught fur squarely in its net. Actually, her
calculus would exonerate fur but trap the bacon sandwich or the pint of milk
far more effectively. Or rather, it would trap the third bacon sandwich of the
week, and the second ice cream. It would certainly trap the bulk of food animal
production, even if it only slightly dented the principle of it.
There
is no need to accept the argument about luxury in the terms which a
left-leaning politician such as Maria Eagle, in common with most of the animal
rights protesters, sees it. True, fur has since the beginning of history been a
symbol of affluence and display. From the medieval period until now, it was
incorporated in ceremonial and official dress for that reason. Ermine,
especially, has always been associated with authority. These habits and ideas
probably flowed from the costliness of fabrics which were efficiently warm, but
which above all had the same sort of exotic rarity value that attached to
spices. They came, similarly, from far afield. They came through the
entrepreneurship and courage of traders.
Fur
has been fashionable in various periods ever since, perhaps especially in the
last decades of the nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth
century. It is hard at this distance to know what people thought then about the
animals which had been killed to create the clothes they longed for. In the
first decades of this century, far more fur came from trapped animals than was
farmed. Farmed fur wasn’t common until the 1930's. Whether people were just
less interested in animal welfare then is hard to say. Certainly, the fate of
an animal depended on its owner, since animals were conceived of as a person's
property, and his rights over his property were sacred. [Brown, 1974] They were
less squeamish times, but arguably not much less caring or gentle for all that.
[Thomas, 1984] Human relations, too, were conducted with less superficial
display of compassion, but arguably with just as great real or effective
concern.
After
the Second World War, furs remained the prerogative of old money, but they became in the 1950s, as
they had been in the 30s, a piece of display desired by the new rich of show
business and industry. This changed as protest began to make fur-wearing in the
It
must have seemed then to the protesters that the entire social scene had
changed and moved in their favour. By the early 80s, Greenpeace was able to
commission David Bailey to make the notorious cinema advertisement, with the
slogan about many dumb animals giving up their lives to clothe just one dumb
human animal. Many in the fashion and entertainment industries - models and
ex-models amongst them - signed up to help make fur-wearing a despised habit.
In 1995 Naomi Campbell famously aligned herself with the PETA (People for the
Ethical Treatment of Animals) poster campaign in which naked models were
photographed with the caption: "We'd rather go naked than wear fur".
Apparently untroubled by her inconsistency, in 1997 and again in 1999 she was
starring in catwalk shows featuring fur. [Guardian, 1997; The Express, 1999]
Curiously,
and unexpectedly, the protest, mostly based in
About
60 percent of the world trade in fur skins, but nothing like that proportion of
the manufacture or retailing of fur garments, is conducted in
Now, however, there is hardly any
garment manufacture in the
It follows from all these factors
that little might change if fur could no longer be farmed in the
It is also useful to note that the
Fur, mostly from overseas, is traded through
It
might not matter to the protesters, but the majority of
The fur trade has occasionally
justified its existence by stressing that fur is an ecologically sound means of
keeping warm, and have hoped by this argument to suggest that fur answers basic
human needs. This reasoning is sound so far as it goes, but it doesn't quite go
far enough.
There are all sorts of ways of
keeping warm, but the one we should really celebrate is the one which satisfies
one of the greatest of human urges: the urge to extravagance. The dislike of
luxury which lies behind much anti-fur protest ignores the fact that luxury is
vital to human society, and that this form of extravagance comes without the
ecological disadvantage which attaches to, say, the ownership and use of large
cars or speedboats, or even to foreign travel by jet plane.
There
is a powerful case to be made for the idea that the need for luxury is one of
the most fundamental human urges, as it is one of the most powerful
well-springs of activity in the whole animal kingdom. Biologists have long
understood a Darwinian explanation for the apparent excesses of display which,
say, the peacock indulges in. Sexual attractiveness which involves a
conspicuous and costly display demonstrates a male's ability to satisfy to an
extraordinary degree the capacity to fulfil his basic needs.
Jared
Diamond, Professor of Physiology at the University of California, Los Angeles
and a leading evolutionary biologist, cites the views of various biologists to
the effect that conspicuous display is useful to animals perhaps because their
capacity to survive whilst throwing huge resources at display promises genetic
success [Diamond, 1997]
But what about people, with their subtler and more
powerful minds? Professor Diamond supposes that our attitude to adornment and
display may always have had something in common with the adaptive behaviour of
animals.
He
compares and contrasts a stag's antlers with a piece of human display common in
the West:
[a
stag's antlers represent an] investment of calcium, phosphate, and calories,
yet they are grown and discarded each year. Only the most well-nourished males
- ones that are mature, socially dominant, and free of parasites - can afford
that investment. Hence a female deer can regard big antlers as an honest ad for
male quality, just as a woman whose boyfriend buys and discards a Porsche
sports car each year can believe his claim of being wealthy. But antlers carry
a second message not shared with Porsches. Whereas a Porsche does not generate
more wealth, big antlers do bring their owner access to the best pastures by
enabling him to defeat rival males and fight off predators.
Actually,
the Porsche does bear at least a passing relationship to utility. Throughout
history, men have needed to be swift. Even in historically recent times they
have needed to be well-mounted. The quality and expense of a man's horse was a
sign to himself and others he sought to impress that he had glamorous and
extravagant as well as efficient means of locomotion. The horse's modern
replacement and surrogate is the sports car. True, for most forms of getting
about, a Porsche is not a highly functional piece of equipment, but it can
function as a necessary car for most purposes, more or less.
In
any case, redundancy is also important, in human affairs as in nature, as
Professor Diamond reminds us:
While
any man can boast to a woman that he is rich and therefore she should go to bed
with him in the hopes of enticing him into marriage, he might be lying. Only
when she sees him throwing away money on useless expensive jewellery and sports
cars can she believe him.
This
sort of argument have been retailed elegantly by Geoffrey Miller, who cites the
Israeli biologist Amotz Zahavi's "The Handicap Principle" to the
effect that "there is a necessary tension between natural selection (for
survival) and sexual selection (for attracting mates), and waste is at the
heart of that tension…. The Handicap
Principle suggests that prodigious waste is a necessary feature of sexual
courtship." Humans, like animals, expend energy and wealth in evidencing
their attractiveness as gene-stock. They do so as part of their instinctual
make-up. They flourish when they can display well, and suffer when they cannot.
[Miller, 1999]
Modern consumer
society operates on the principle that conspicuous consumption may pose moral
dilemmas, of course it does, but that it is one important engine of human
happiness and well-being.
That is why few of us condemn the quest for glamour. Fur is
not merely an extravagant item of display, it is an overtly sexual one. This is
the essence of glamour: it is where power, money and sexuality meet. Glamour
can't really be polite, understated, modest. It has some difficulty hanging on
to being merely decent. Liz Hurley characterises modern British glamour: she
wears expensive clothes and diamonds and is perhaps beautiful. But she is in
the image of Diana Dors, say, in outrageous and overt sexual immodesty.
Glamour cannot really operate in private. Though the
ownership, say, of Fendi furs or Ferraris, is essentially an egotistical
matter, it is only a very eccentric person who enjoys these goods in private.
Their public display is crucial to their enjoyment.
The interesting thing about this element of
public display of these sorts of goods is that to a surprising degree, the rest
of us get a free ride from their ownership by others. Our magazines and
television are enlivened, let alone largely paid for, by the blandishments of
advertisers enticing the rich; the fashion and society pages and gossip columns
all shower us with examples of the luxury and attractiveness of the rich and
their spending. We can ogle the images of what we cannot afford. If we have the
good sense to keep envy and jealousy in their place, we can enjoy the fantasy
without too much resentment.
There
is a strand of Christian thinking which disparages this sort of display, and
the vicarious pleasure we may take in it, as worldly, unspiritual, egotistical,
and which instead celebrates abstemiousness as being in the tradition of
asceticism of the founding fathers of the faith. This tendency has underpinned
socialism from its medieval beginnings, and it now permeates green thinking,
which prides itself on reducing man's impact on nature and countering
materialism.
Whatever the apparent value of the
pedigree of worries about materialism, it has several difficulties. One is that
it does not allow for the facts of human nature. But another is that it is hard
to decouple the great moral value of the free economy and the free society from
their roots in individualism, and that by definition is not amenable to
discipline.
Capitalism is the business of harnessing the aspirations to
affluence, display and glamour as basic energising forces for the entire
economy. Capitalism has the merit of encouraging and rewarding the accumulation
of wealth, and of channelling the energies of powerful people into acquiring
and displaying wealth whilst creating opportunities and affluence all around
them. It rewards risk-taking with wealth, and freely celebrates the channelling
of wealth into waste and glamour [North, 1999]. So far as we know, societies
which stifle these opportunities for very long develop covert consumption and status-seeking
by elites which are either criminal or state-sponsored.
So we need to see the social merit
of conspicuous consumption by individuals. It satisfies those who are
successfully ambitious and spurs on those who are merely ambitious, while it diverts
society at large.
One could go so far as to say that
one of the great merits of the fur trade is that it precisely is a luxury
trade, satisfying not the boringly basic human needs, but far more interesting
and vital ones. In an important way, wants are needs. A society which cannot
give people what they want, will pall. It will pall in interest and vibrancy,
but it will also soon more seriously fail to attract or keep some of the most
useful of its citizens. A society that cannot entice the few cannot sustain the
many.
These arguments should not be
contentious in an age which has rejected socialism. They remain so because
populism dictates a slight anxiety about anything which might be called
elitism.
Bien pensant opinion mostly affects to despise the matter of getting
rich, though liberal-minded writers and artists, or liberal lawyers, are no
less dedicated to getting wealth than their right-wing counterparts. Still, the
aesthetic of the intelligentsia tends toward understated means of expressing their
financial well-being, and eschews the flashily vulgar expenditure of those who
are inventing new ways of making money.
Wearing furs now hovers between two
interesting extremes, rather as does the ownership of Rolls Royces. It is the
preserve alike of those with old money who are damned if they should give up
old ways of displaying it, and of those with new money who are not yet abashed
about vulgar display.
It would be a bleak prospect for
stylish
Oddly, though, after years in which it seemed that the
opinion-formers in the fashion world were going along with the protesters, and
adopting a certain protest chic (think of designer houses like Red Or Dead or
Katherine Hamnett), there is now strong evidence that old-fashioned glamour,
and fur in particular, have proved capable of attracting a new generation of
designers and customers.
Luxury for its own sake is in
fashion, even after being discredited by the downfall of the yuppies and the
Trumps (briefly), and after satirical successes such as the Bonfire Of the
Vanities. Now we see the downmarket film, Diamonds Are Forever, being
celebrated by the diamond industry (formerly a South African pariah), and by a
galaxy of minor stars in borrowed diamonds, all given the blessing of Prince
Charles sporting a Versace handkerchief
in his breast pocket.
Fur in particular has flourished
because the idea of glamour has certain constants. But fur also has newer
connotations which have found their way into fashion.
The modern mind is not easy to
chart. But one thing seems especially to characterise it. It dislikes rules.
Many of the customers for fur retailers are now young women who have made their
own way and their own money, and if they want sports cars and furs, that's
exactly what they'll have. They do not need the say-so of socialist or green or
animal rights people to tell them whether such expenditure is acceptable. They
are not interested in liberal opinion. This generation of young women will
indulge its instincts with scant respect for respectability, or, at the
extreme, even the law.
One strand of these instincts is
rather similar to the strand of "dangerous" Romanticism which the Age
of Reason, the Enlightenment, spawned in
It
is interesting that many modern artists are addressing the issue of man's
relations with his own body, dead or alive, and with animals. The latter are
not seen from a bunny-hugging, animal rights point of view. Much of the work of
people like Damien Hirst is a meditation on animals and our feelings about them
which has anything but an animal rights perspective. After all, Damien Hirst
himself is a co-proprietor of restaurants which sell animal produce at high
prices. Charles Saatchi, patron of modern art and, according to one paper,
"the creator of New Neurotic Realism", plans to turn his controversial
Royal Academy of Arts show, Sensation, into a theme for a string of restaurants
in which, "diners can expect to sit amongst…. A shark in formaldehyde by
Hirst…" [Sunday Telegraph, 1999c]
Fur takes its place in this new aesthetic. Its appeal is an
atavistic one. In wearing fur one is in the tradition of one's earliest hunting
forebears, and of one's medieval ancestors. The new catwalk style of fur is not
soignee, it is savage. Its most
distinctive feature is to use fur as though the wearer were a neanderthal
tribes woman, and the fur itself is made to seem as though it were hot from the
animal's back. This actually belies the way that it is modern, highly
technical, treatment of fur which allows such freedom of use. [Daily Telegraph,
1999]
There is no contradiction, and nothing new, in this
deliberate anachronism and atavism. Styles in food, furniture and fashion are
aways driven forward as much by admiration for the peasant and the primitive as
for the sophisticated. Like much which is truly stylish, fur demonstrates how
the primitive and the sophisticated are in close proximity. The revival of fur
in the fashion trade comes about as part of an interest in the primitive, even
the warrior and certainly the hunting heritage. Without thinking it through,
designers are drifting toward the Romantic, the gothic and the medieval for
inspiration, and fur finds its place in that aesthetic as attractive, but
dangerous too.
The
whole world of the arts is now, as it has always been, infected by an urge
which seeks to break down barriers of any sort. As soon as we think we have
understood what certain people will think and feel, we find that a dynamic
society overturns the cliché.
We might, for instance, note that the
Institute of Contemporary Art is now headed by Ivan Massow, a
commercially-successful homosexual master of fox hounds. [Telegraph, 1999a]
This is a confluence of four attributes and activities (art, entrepreneurship,
overt homosexuality, hunting) which even a decade ago would be unlikely to
co-habit. It is of a piece with an almost anarchic melt-down of old patterns of
thought, of old ideas of decency.
Designers and their customers are not making political
statements when using fur. Nonetheless in the present climate it takes a
certain courage to buy and wear fur. Fur-wearing takes its place with other new
patterns in fashion because it is challenging, and defiant. It is dissident,
but not in the old way: it is not cocking a snook at the old Establishment (as
dissidence used to seek to do). It is cocking a snook against the newly
established political correctness of the left and of the greens. Aristocrats,
country people, parvenus, artists and designers can ally on that, if on little
else. Like any true social change, it is not just a matter of poses, but of
muddles of attributes rearranging themselves in people's minds. It is much more
a question of what people are allowing themselves to say or do than of any deep
change in what they actually are. It is not a change in what people want, but
in what they admit to, allow or expect.
It is no use applying ordinary
standards of moral seriousness to fashion, any more than it is useful to apply
them to art. The most serious artist, like the fashion designer, will always be
tempted to test a prohibition, rather as he or she will always test an
inhibition, to see if this is an area in which a shock and a surprise can be
delivered. People do not ask permission from moralists before finding something
compelling. When people want to take risks, live dangerously, or explore this
or that aspect of taste, they do so often in defiance of respectable,
intelligent or compassionate opinion. This is not to say that wearing fur is
irrational or hard-hearted: it is merely to say that a charge of irrationality
or even cruelty might not deter people from wanting to do it. And so fur,
because of who dislikes it, is bound to attract new friends. Socially, nothing
attracts like opposition.
Without permission from respectable
opinion, and in defiance of what might have been thought to be settled
objections, and quite contrary to expectation, designers and customers are
swinging toward increasing use of fur. The catwalks are full of it, though
usually in the form of trims and accessories. Young designers are spearheading
the most avant-garde explorations of this new vogue. Models (most notably Naomi
Campbell) who previously, and probably thoughtlessly, had opined that fur was
unspeakably cruel, now seem happy to wear it.
But it would be a mistake to see the
switch to fur as a political statement in itself. The Economist has noted the
recent flurry of interest in fur and concluded that the return to fur is not
self-consciously political. "For the last word, however, it makes sense to
go to the designers, and they have a rather less complicated take on the
subject. According to Jean-Paul Gaultier, 'It's not about politics, it's about
quality. If you want the softness and lightness and warmth of skin, you use
skin. Nothing feels like sable. If you want that feeling, you use that' …..
There was a lot of fur in the autumn/winter couture shows because the
couturiers had suddenly remembered that in autumn/winter, in the northern
hemisphere, fur is, well - nice." [Economist, 1999] What is more, the
tendency toward the outrageous and the animal is not being driven by cynical
and case-hardened older gurus and trend-setters. Rather, the old guard makes
regular pilgrimages to the graduation shows of places such as St Martin's
college of fashion in London, whose alumni are reported to be driven much more
by a quest for freshness, feel and theatricality than they are by any
self-consciously serious ideas. [Evening Standard, 1999]
This is not a case of Reactionary Chic, the successor to
Radical Chic.
Those who once opposed fur have not
necessarily rethought the issue. The support for fur of some of the people who
now work in or model it is not necessarily comforting to the trade merely
because they once opposed the trade. There is no sign that many of them did
much thinking when they condemned fur, and their reinstatement of it does not
seem either to have flowed from fresh study or research. They do not seem so
much to have changed their mind as merely their behaviour. They have not so
much adapted their moral thinking as reconsidered what is fashionable.
This shades into the political only
when one remembers that there is a strong modern imperative to the permissive.
There is a spirit of aggressive pluralism in the air. This is very testing to
those whose business is pressing for bans, and it is hardly less so for those
who press for a courteous understanding of other people's sensitivity. In all
sorts of respects, we seem to be seeing a reaction to the "ban"
culture, as we do to the "blame" culture. It is not merely the right
which dislikes both: in the permissive and libertarian LM magazine, the left
too has discovered the joys of choice.
At its least attractive this is manifest in people's
impatience with any restriction on their behaviour, as when, for instance,
jet-skiers speed dangerously and noisily close to swimmers, or youngsters allow
their stereos to "leak" into the hearing of everyone else sharing a
railway carriage with them. It is quite funny, when it is seen as young people
defiantly smoking in the street, and less so when they do it in the Tube. When
the outrageous behaviour is risky or costly only to the perpetrator, we surely
ought to reach over backwards to condone it.
But what happens when desires compete noisily or
dangerously? What are we to say when we are up against what Ivan Illich called
the "radical monopoly": for instance, when someone seeking quiet is
afflicted with the tyranny, as he sees it, of noise? What are we to say when a
young man's enterprise brings him to busk in our train, and pits his love of his own voice against our expectation of a
normal silence? Or when he shoves the Big Issue in your face, or she her baby?
Or when an overweight middle aged man arrives in the supermarket wearing a
sleeveless vest? Or, to come to our issue, what to make about the woman in fur
who stands between two Vegans in the supermarket queue? These are all forms of
social pollution, so far as those who do not like them are concerned. How to
unpick these problems?
We cannot give in to a tyranny of
the sensitive. A man has the right to smell of beer on the tube; we cannot stop
people wearing shell-suits. We cannot make public places subject themselves to
a fascism of orderliness. Few Vegans are so sensitive that they could not eat a
veggie-burger in a McDonald's, where others celebrate the muscle of beef, the
breast and leg of chicken. Surely, people have a right to wear fur in public
and still be the subject of the more normal rules of politeness.
However, it is no use to say that
the wearing of fur is no-one's business but the furrier's and their customers.
There is a moral dimension to fur wearing, whatever the indifference of many
fur-designers or fur-wearers to the lives and deaths of fur-bearers. It is
entirely possible that a strong body of modern opinion may support people's
right to take pleasure in animals any way they like. This would not make such
use or consumption right. It might even make it all the more important that
people who were interested in animals take all the more interest.
The problem is not unique to fur by
any means. We have seen in many areas of intensive husbandry that many
consumers simply buy on price, and it has really fallen to a minority to
consider the animals' welfare or indeed to consider the animal at all. As
Stephen Budiansky notes in The Covenant of the Wild, modern society seems
schizophrenically composed of people who treat animals as humans and those who
treat them as things. The latter part of this case might well be the case with
some fur-wearers. [Budiansky, 1994]
It might seem odd that people who
wear fur are not often interested in how the animal who contributed to the
product came to do so. One might think that consumers for fur would like to
know whether it was trapped in the high arctic, or farmed in Scandinavia. But
that's how it is, and the matter is much the same with people eating bacon or
beef.
People have the right to wear fur
without thinking about animals at all, if that's what they want to do. There is
no form of human consumption of legal goods and services which requires that
one consider the wider dimensions of what one does. The Rolls Royce owner is
not obliged to understand enough atmospheric physics to determine whether his
threat to global warming is too great to be tolerated. The McDonald's customer
does not have to wonder about the cow that made his meat. The girl getting
engaged doesn't have to wonder how many black South Africans burrowed miles
below the earth's surface for her gem.
These are matters which anyone can
take an interest in, and it is probably well that some people do. But we are
not all required to, and actually could not. Pressure groups exist to try to
force their particular agenda on to society, and they do a useful job in
attempting to keep us up to the mark. But that does not make them right when
they target selected, highly personalised, villains (say, customers of fur
shops) rather than address the political process as to whether an activity
(say, fur-wearing) ought to be proscribed. Besides, their energetic espousal of
this or that view does not have a particularly firm grasp of rectitude merely
because it is committed and dedicated. When pressure groups pit themselves
against interest groups, it is almost always forgotten that they have vested
interests too. Society is entitled to be sceptical, lackadaisical, traditional,
and permissive in face of their reforming zeal. This is not purely a matter of
laziness: the committed and the partisan are often wrong and narrow-minded, as
well as dogmatic. The rest of society is entitled to apply a leisurely
scepticism to their urgency.
These are the sorts of reasons why it was odd that in
Beverly Hills recently there was a proposal that fur products should be
labelled as having been killed by such means as gassing, electrocution and neck
wringing. Down that road madness lies. Firstly, the reality of such things is
not conveyed by a couple of words; secondly, the list ranges from the innocuous
to the tortured, and of the item in one's hand, one would have no way of
knowing which applied. Thirdly, to be just, such a stigmatisation would need to
be applied to all animal produce, of which the label would be equally true, and
equally misleading.
The protestors make various claims
about the popularity of fur which appear incontrovertible, but which are deeply flawed. They cunningly claim that
"the fur trade is a dying trade",[4] when
actually it is merely one with ups and downs, and currently a thriving world
wide market. What is more, they claim that the public is drifting away from fur
of its own accord. But there is good
anecdotal evidence that those women who now own furs would mostly have gone on
enjoyably wearing them if they had not felt castigated and endangered as they
did so. This is important. Fur wearing has remained attractive to those who
knew and liked it: they have been intimidated - not persuaded - out of wearing
what they want. The anti-fur protesters need to be seen as people who have
bullied people, but not won their minds. What is more, it is not true, as is
routinely claimed by protesters, that retailers ceased stocking fur because it
had become unpopular and unprofitable. For instance, there is evidence in
correspondence from Harrods that the store ceased to stock fur because it had
succumbed to intolerable animal rights pressure, and the threat of damage and
possibly violence it brought.[5] This in
spite of public protestations to the contrary.
So far from society having drifted away from fur because
arguments were presented to it, actually women who were enjoying buying and
wearing fur were forced to stop wearing it because they had been robbed of the
pleasure of the thing, and had nastiness imposed instead. Wearing fur went from
being a luxury to being at least unpleasant and quite possibly a danger.
The events of the past decade or so
have left the protesters believing that they have in effect won the argument,
if not yet finally been successful in driving the fur trade to extinction. In
truth, the argument has barely begun.
Public opinion polls are often cited as proving that the
public has a settled attitude of antagonism to the fur trade. [Eagle, 1999] But
in so far as this implies that the majority of British people dislike the
trade, this only means that a large number of people very ignorant of and
thoughtless about an issue has a firm view of it.
After all, the majority of people are either wholly ignorant
of the issue or in receipt of only one side of the argument. There is good
evidence that once they are more informed, instincts of fair play seem to take
opinion in rather different directions. It is especially noteworthy that when a
jury, picked to be representative of society at large, heard both sides of the
argument for a television show it voted seven to five in favour of the
"accused", a fur-farmer pleading to be allowed to continue his trade.
[Widdecombe, 1998] Both sides of the argument had been put, fairly and
squarely. What may have persuaded the jury above all was that the fur-farmer
was patently an ordinary Briton, who seemed likely to be speaking the truth
when he said he liked his animals the way any farmer likes his charges, and
would not knowingly harm them. This may well have been an efficient
reality-check for the jury.
The change of view once the "jury" has real
evidence, or a rounder context is a common phenomenon. There is good evidence that
people are suspicious about things about which they hear in the media (the NHS
in general, the water industry in general, politicians in general) but much
more positive about what they actually know (their doctor or hospital, their
water provider, their own MP). Similarly, there is good evidence that asking
the question, "Should scientists be allowed to experiment on
animals?", received a very different response from people asked it
"cold" and those asked a "warm start" version which
included the condition: Some scientists are developing and testing new drugs to
reduce pain… animal experiments…. make more rapid progress [possible]".
"Just 24 per cent of people were in favour, with 64 per cent against… On
the "warm start" question people backed animal experimentation by a
slim majority, with 45 per cent for, versus 41 against… a swing of 22 percent". Interestingly,
only two per cent of those polled had worn a fur coat or pursued blood sports,
but 62 per cent of this group clearly favoured animal experimentation:
arguably, their realism was allied with robust humanitarianism. [New Scientist,
1999]
All this leaves protesters in a
peculiar position. The most ardent protestors are almost universally from the
left, though many of their less active but occasionally vocal supporters are
not. The hard core had thought to have the argument going almost exclusively
their way. There were and are few voices raised in defence of the fur trade.
And yet the trade remains robust and capable of winning votes in favour of its
survival when it gets a decent hearing.
The media has never bothered to provide that hearing. Fur
has been discussed almost entirely, when it has achieved coverage at all, in
terms of its fashion interest and on fashion pages. These have occasionally ventured
into the issue and usually done so from a profoundly biased anti-fur point of
view. When fur has been in the news at the front of newspapers, it has been so
mostly when anti-fur protesters managed a stunt which seemed worthy of note in
its own right.
The media is seldom interested in the business of balanced
reporting in the issues it covers. It is most comfortable with the views of
campaign and protest groups which seem intuitively to be on the side of the
angels and to express the views of
"the people" and their thinking. Business, by contrast, gets
short shrift, as does science. On the other hand, if one is patient, most
issues will receive the coverage they deserve. The media has other instincts
than its socially and politically dissident attitudes. It has a low boredom
threshold and will in the end tire of almost any attitude it adopts. It loves
surprises. It also has a taste for the underdog. And then there is the
competitive spirit of the media: no attitude which appeals to the left or liberal
world will for long be popular in the rightwing press, and vice versa.
Thus, every position, and every
inclination, of the journalist is in constant turmoil, and under constant fire
and threat of overthrow. Greenpeace, for instance, has long been one of the media's heroes, accepted on all sides as a
source of good images, stirring stories, and populist comment. But that did not
protect the campaigners from criticism when the media began to perceive them as
over-mighty.
In the end, Shell's point of view over
Brent Spar did begin to come through, and Greenpeace's apparent triumph turned
to dust as the media turned on them. In the end, an honest reading of the BSE
risk has been filtering through. Already, about three months after it first hit
the headlines, the media is beginning to see that Monsanto's point of view on
GMOs may be at least as respectable as Greenpeace's. [North, 2000]
There is a detectable pattern to how
these events unfold. Greenpeace's victory over Shell, for example, prompted
journalists to wonder whether the campaigners' power was legitimate and to look
for the first time with some sympathy at Shell's position.
In the case of fur, by far the best
coverage the industry had ever received occurred when campaigners broke into
fur farms and released thousands of mink into the wild, in the New Forest
August 1998 and on the Staffordshire/Shropshire border in September 1998.
Suddenly, the plight of the animals and the danger they posed to indigenous
wildlife made journalists wonder whether the protesters were necessarily right.
Writers from the Daily Telegraph the Times were for the first time despatched
to write about the actualities of the farms rather than the myths perpetuated
by campaigners. [Times, 1998a; DailyTelegraph, 1998?; Times 1998b] The reports
were by and large pretty favourable. The journalists were perhaps surprised,
but also seemingly impressed, by the normality of the farms they saw. The next
burst of favourable coverage happened when Maria Eagle launched her Bill.
[Times, 1999a, Daily Telegraph, 1999c]. Most recently, the trend has continued
as the Government announced its bill. [Times 1999f]
Goodness
knows, finally, by what right mankind uses animals. Religious people may feel
they do so under some sort of license from the deity. The rest of us have to
come to some more obviously rational explanation. This is not the place for a
long discussion of the moral underpinnings for the human use of animals,
fascinating as that might be. What does matter here is to discus whether the
use of animals for their fur is any worse than the use of animals for anything
else. We are not arguing that fur-farming is especially virtuous, but that it
bears strict comparison with many other forms of animal use we do not condemn
half as much. We dare to go a little further: fur farming does not seem to
cause undue suffering by any of the rather good means humans have developed to
think about such things.
Millions of animals die every year to provide fur. About 85
per cent of them will have been raised in farms. About 85 per cent of the
animals will be mink, and of those about 85 percent will have been raised on
farms, the vast majority of them in Denmark, and rather fewer in Holland and
north America. A very few of these 30 million or so farmed mink - perhaps
120,000 - will have been raised in the UK. Of the fur-bearers, only mink are
raised in the UK. A handful of other species are raised in small numbers on
farms in other countries. The big majority of these non-mink animals are foxes
of various breeds, and most of those are raised in Finland and Norway.
One advantage of the concentration
of fur-farming in these old and affluent northern democracies is that the vast
majority of animals farmed for fur live and die in countries with law-abiding
farmers who are inspected by organised and thorough ministerial watchdogs. This
is not mostly a cowboy business.
It does, however, have its ugly
side. I don't mean that there is the necessity of killing the animals. We will
come to the apparently grim side of even good farming. What matters here is
that animal rights campaigners have been able to find a few examples of
manifestly bad and sometimes criminally poor farming. This is almost all the
general pubic knows of fur-farming: blurred videos and impassioned
denunciations are all they had to go on.
So far as I know, the
campaigners have no evidence of bad farming in continental Europe, nor of
widespread abuses anywhere. But Stella MacArtney, for instance, has done the
voice-over for a PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) video which
was sent to many fashion designers who have had the temerity to use fur. The
footage purported to show foxes, and other animals, on a US fur farm, and many
of the animals seemed very obviously to be in an appalling state of neglect.
The BFTA insist that this was not actually a fur farm at all.[6]
Nearer home, Respect For Animals
obtained footage, apparently in England, of mink in a state of excitement, and
perhaps of stress. This video was shown by Maria Eagle at a press conference to
launch her private member's bill to ban fur farming, and snippets of it have
been widely seen on British television. The animals are seen to rush about
their cages, clearly agitated. The difficulty, however, is that the place
involved is not identified. The animals might conceivably have been on a farm
(it would have been a very unusual as well as a regrettable one) on which
animals were routinely stressed and in need of help. But the material might
have been obtained by first deliberately exciting the animals and them filming
the resulting chaos. Respect has video
of disturbed animals on a southern England mink farm: but the British Fur Trade
Association insists the material dates from the chaotic months following
releases of the animals by rights activists. The careful pairing of animals,
and their entire way of life, was hugely disrupted and their behaviour on being
forcibly reunited and grouped with animals they did not know was predictably
vicious and confused.
Respect have filmed a worker on one
of England's 13 mink farms: it was footage which led to the man's being charged
and convicted on several counts of animal abuse in 1999. He was shown swinging
an animal through the air as it hung on to his hand by its teeth. This was
valuable and depressing information, so far as it went and may amount to the
only socially valuable work Respect has done.
At the worst it proved that a farmer
might be a member of the small British Fur Breeder's Association and not adhere
to adequate standards of staff management. The association's farmer-officials
were duly and rightly shocked and claim to have taken tighter control on
matters. As representatives of ten of the 11 licensed fur farmers, perhaps they
were remiss not to have been more rigorous, earlier.
Beyond
that, the film possibly demonstrated that it is quite easy to do mink farming
very badly, as it is easy to do any farming badly. It is also entirely possible, and highly
profitable, to do mink farming well. This latter is not easy, but then no
intensive husbandry is easy. It would not be the first thought for someone
seeking a quick buck. Indeed, the country's two leading fur-farmers have told
me they enjoyed mink-keeping since childhood, in very much the way another
country-dweller might enjoy keeping ferrets. They may have proved canny
hobbyists, but their trade began with the affection for their charges which
characterises a hobby.
There are few British fur farmers,
but several of them have taken interested neighbours and media around their
farms. The most persistently bold of these is Mike Cobbledick, of Cornwall, who
has received the same sort of attention from protesters as most fur farmers,
but has remained the most publicly unabashed and bullish about the quality of
his work and the well-being of his animals. To that end, he allowed TV cameras
on to his farm right at the height of the furore over Maria Eagle's bill to ban
his sort of husbandry. The resulting footage was seen on BBC's Countryfile and
Sky News and showed serried ranks of cages in airy open low sheds and within
each cage, breeding mink looking lively, relaxed, inquisitive, as they usually
do on well-run farms. Rather similar footage was shown on West Eye View, an HTV
series (which also gave an outing to the Respect footage discussed above). Had the cameras lingered, they might have
been able to catch the animals showing clear irritation and perhaps even fear:
mink do not like their territory for long being invaded by humans, however
friendly. At the right time of year, female mink could be shown with the annual
average of five young, rather more than they could expect in the wild, so fit
are they. The males could be seen grown to about twice their average weight in
the wild. Quite possibility their longevity would also be increased in
captivity, though that is not proven. If it were, that would complete the
triumvirate of advantages (fertility, healthiness and longevity) which are
normally conferred on creatures in well-managed captivity.
It is always easy to portray caged
animals as resentful, suffering and oppressed. The sight of wire alone will do
that. Add to that the fact that mink cages are not for long shiny and smart,
but mildly grubby, and one has a ready source of worrying images. But the
footage from Mike Cobbledick's farm goes a long way to reassure that on the
face of it mink are in good fettle.
Even so, impressions can be
misleading. The disinterested observer has to look behind the TV images for
something a little more rigorous as evidence. It may help that I have visited
five mink farms and seen only evidence which supports the Cobbledick rather
than the Respect view of what happens on well-managed farms. It is true that I
have only seen farms whose owners were invited by the trade to show me round.
They were farms the trade was proud of. Two were in England, and three in
Denmark. Of the Danish farms, two were research stations. One of the enemies of
mink farming, Professor Roger Harris of Bristol University's zoology
department, has suggested to me in a telephone conversation that I might have
been taken to farms just after feeding time when the animals were especially
relaxed, and suggested that this is would be an obvious ploy. But on
reflection, I remember having seen animals being fed, which presumes that I
also saw them just before they were fed. This is the time when their behaviour
is said to be most disturbing. Actually, I saw nothing odd. It is not unduly
significant that observers may see only good farms: the case in favour of
fur-farming needs to show that the thing can be well done and to accept that it
should be done as well as it can be, not prove that it is always done well.
Even my own impressions wouldn't
quite do as an indicator of animal welfare, even for my own satisfaction.
There is a good deal of academic
research work on farmed mink welfare, and some of it is English, serious and
recent. Much more of the work is Danish or Dutch. It comes from veterinary or
zoological departments of established universities. None of it was sponsored
directly by fur farm interests, though the trade has provided animals and
facilities to some projects at home and abroad.[7] Some of the continental work was sponsored by
state agriculture departments, who have a reputation for being as concerned
with commercial interests as they are with abstract matters of animal welfare.
However, even research sponsored by agriculture ministries has to survive peer
review, and the workers in such university departments have to be scrupulous if
they are to survive the implied taint which comes with their funding. It is
sometimes claimed that one of the journals used by Continental scientists for
their publications, Scientifur, is not adequately peer-reviewed. Actually, the
most important insights contained in papers there are to be found from the same
authors in peer-reviewed journals, so the point seems redundant.
One strand of Dutch work, that of Professor P R Wiepkema in
the 80s and 90s, and now followed on by Professor B M Spruijt, of the
University of Utrecht, corrals the best evidence available to propose reforms
in fur farming to the Dutch Minister of Agriculture, Nature Conservancy and
Fisheries and the Dutch Parliament. In 1995, all the parties agreed a ten year
Plan of Approach, or action plan. [Wiepkema, 1994; Spruijt, 1999]
All of the researchers who conduct
this work are respectable by any standards. Some believe that mink welfare is
approaching acceptability, and is in any case not easy to improve. Most believe
mink welfare to be amongst the best of any intensively farmed animal. Many hold
this belief having worked with other farmed species, or having worked alongside
others who do.
This general view was clearly not
held by the members of the Farm Animal Welfare Council, the British expert
advisory panel whose studies and recommendations have formed the basis of
Government efforts to improve conditions on animal farms since the 70s. This
group produced a two page report on fur farming in 1989 [FAWC, 1989]. It said,
"Mink and fox have been bred in captivity for only about 50-60 generations
and the Council is particularly concerned about the keeping of what are
essentially wild animals in small barren cages." But this was
self-evidently a cursory survey, based on few farm visits and citing none of
the available research, or experience, from abroad. Even so it did not condemn
fur farming out of hand, but struck a decidedly sceptical note and asked for
more research.
That seemed to be that. The UK fur-farmers suffered constant protest activities, and fewer and fewer remained in the business, partly depressed by the pressure against them and partly by low prices during the world economic downturn in the early 90s. The glamour and expense of fur did not suit the mood of a post