The world’s second-largest fur producer is saying goodbye to fur. On Tuesday, Poland handed a legislation to part out fur farms over the following eight years — a serious blow to the worldwide fur trade.
In 2023, fur farmers within the Central European nation killed some three million foxes, minks, raccoon canines, and chinchillas for coats and trim, accounting for about one out of each seven animals within the worldwide fur commerce.
The wild animals are confined in small wire-bottom cages for months — in services that resemble the sort of manufacturing facility farms the place animals are raised for meat — till they’re killed through carbon dioxide gassing or anal electrocution. Their pelts are then shipped world wide to clothes producers and style homes.
A latest ballot discovered that over two-thirds of Poles assist a fur farm ban. “This can be a determination that Poles have awaited for a few years,” Poland’s President Karol Nawrocki stated in a video posted on X. “A call that displays our compassion, our civilizational maturity, and our respect for all residing creatures.”
Because the Eighties, animal activists world wide have campaigned in opposition to fur farming. Progress was sluggish going for many years however accelerated within the mid-2010s, with the variety of animals farmed for fur falling from 140 million in 2014 to twenty.5 million in 2024.
That progress took place by means of a mixture of country-level bans; protests in opposition to main style homes and retailers; and financial challenges in China and Russia, the most important fur patrons. Poland’s new legislation ought to solely velocity up that momentum.
How Polish activists — and rural residents — fought the fur trade and received
Poland’s fur farm ban is a case research in persistence, given it was activists’ seventh try and move such a legislation. It’s additionally a case research in coalition constructing.
Whereas activists within the nation have protested in opposition to fur farms for many years, their marketing campaign picked up velocity in 2012 when the advocacy group Otwarte Klatki — Polish for “Open Cages” — launched a sprawling investigation into greater than 50 fur farms, together with some owned by titans of the nation’s fur trade. The investigation revealed animals packed tightly into small, filthy cages; animals affected by extreme accidents; lifeless animals rotting in cages with residing ones (and plenty and many maggots); and animals pacing of their cages and repeatedly biting the perimeters of their enclosures (indicators of stress and frustration).
Extra investigations by Otwarte Klatki — and the animal rights group Viva! Poland — adopted, together with protests, campaigns pressuring retailers to ditch fur, and assist from celebrities and politicians.
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Activists additionally discovered allies within the countryside the place the fur farms are positioned. Larger fur farms are “an amazing nuisance,” Kirsty Henderson, president of the European animal safety group Anima Worldwide, advised me over electronic mail. “The scent is insufferable, the standard of life decreases, and property values drop.” Based on Henderson, rural activists have held 180 protests — round one per thirty days on common — because the early 2010s.
And because the world fur trade collapsed during the last decade, so did Poland’s, which weakened the financial argument to maintain fur farms open. The legislation will present severance for farmworkers and house owners, with greater funds to operators who shut down sooner.
“It’s clearly disappointing information however fur farming could be very sturdy nonetheless in quite a lot of European international locations and our world main fur is utilized by prime style manufacturers,” Jyrki Sura, a program director on the Worldwide Fur Federation, advised me in an electronic mail.
The ripple impact of Poland’s huge transfer
Poland’s fur farm ban alone is an enormous deal, however its affect might ripple throughout the whole continent.
In 2023, animal welfare activists gathered 1.5 million signatures from European Union residents in assist of an EU-wide fur-farming ban. That required the European Fee — the EU’s government department — to formally take into account and reply to the proposal. It’s nonetheless weighing a ban, which has confronted opposition from some politicians in Poland, Finland, and Greece. However that opposition ought to weaken now that Poland has proactively banned fur farming inside its personal borders.
“If the continent’s greatest producer can ban this merciless apply, there is no such thing as a purpose the European Union can’t do the identical,” Henderson of Anima Worldwide advised me. “It’s time for Brussels to finish the patchwork strategy and introduce complete laws that displays the clear will of European residents.”
Whereas most industrialized types of animal exploitation have solely grown in latest many years, Poland’s ban and different latest developments within the marketing campaign in opposition to fur farming exhibits progress is feasible. Simply this week, New York Trend Week introduced it won’t enable fur on runways, with the CEO of the group that plans the annual occasion stating that he “hopes to encourage American designers to suppose extra deeply concerning the style trade’s affect on animals.”
The longer term, it’s now clear, is fur-free. It’s only a matter of how quickly that future arrives.
