The Discerning Brute: fashion, food & etiquette for the ethically handsome man

Fur is Green? More like Fur is Greed. The fur industry is jealous of the environmental movement. Green with envy, in fact. This has resulted in the Greenwashing award of the decade going to the Canada Fur Council’s “Fur is Green” campaign, which includes a spiffy website, a Facebook group, and amazing rationalizations that make historical comparisons impossible to ignore!

There are so many ways to expose the ridiculousness behind their hairy agenda that I don’t know which one to start with! Ok, ok, I’ll start with the one where they call people wearing fur “Environmental Activists“. So Let me get this straight – according to the Fur Is Green Facebook group,  if you are a compassionate person who wants animals to be able to live out their lives in protected habitats and doesn’t want them to be bludgeoned, trapped, or drowned in the wild, or vaginally electrocuted, gassed, or to spend their entire lives in small cages, you are a “fanatic”. But if you rationalize those things under the guise of “supporting thousands of jobs”, while avoiding looking at or openly addressing the actual acts and images associated with fur production, and indulging in toxically peserved luxury products, you are an “environmentalist”? Therefore, according to the CFC, compassion and empathy is fanatical.

Fur Is Toxic.
Producing a fur coat from ranch-raised animals takes more than 15 times as much energy as it does to produce a faux-fur coat! In addition, runoff waste from fur farms destroys waterways, and the toxic chemicals used (ammonia, chromates, bleaching agents, coal tar derivatives, hydrogen peroxide, formaldehyde, sulphides) to preserve the skins are also harming the environment. The fur industry has even lobbied governments in the Great Lakes area to maintain low water-quality standards—so that fur farms won’t be identified as major polluters. Wild trapping is no better,  indiscriminately catching whatever wanders into the trap – cats, dogs, endangered species – who are all thrown away after a miserable death.

I will be breaking a sacred rule of abuser-denial by making a historical comparison here (and they will be outraged at the audacity of my comparison): It was only 60 years ago that Ford Motor Company rationalized using Holocaust slave labor (my relatives) for car production. Yes, I know beavers are not Jews, and yes, I know that the Holocaust is not the fur industry – but the rationalizations used are the same. How could something so clearly terrible happen under our grandparents watch? Social atrocities don’t happen magically. They happen when people making money justify horrifying circumstances thoroughly enough to make them seem like “business as usual”.  The rationalizers avoid being compared to their predecessors at any cost. And they will continue to avoid these comparisons.

It seems there are always people who find ways to rationalize cruelty if there is money to be made – but to claim that your cruel and toxic industry is a workers’ advocacy, environmental, and “humane” industry is total doublethink!

The “FUR It’s MY CHOICE” poster from furisgreen.com showcases the crux of the disconnect. Anyone who has a dog or a cat knows that animals are more than fiber-production-units. What about the individual animal’s choice to avoid sources of pain and torment? To roam free and raise their young? Clearly, that point can never be  addressed.

It’s pretty obvious that the purpose of this campaign is a desperate attempt from a dying industry to quell the doubts of inquisitive potential customers. The problem? The truth is hard to cover up.

Thankfully there are brilliant designers like Calvin Klein, Charlotte Ronson, Stella McCartney, Vivienne Westwood, Benjamin Cho, Duckie Brown, Eddie Bauer, Guess?, H&M, Tommy Hillfiger, John Varvatos, Levi’s, Paul Frank, and people like Tim Gunn , Todd Oldham, Martha Stewart, Ellen Degeners and scores of other indistry professionals who are outspokenly anti-fur.