There are moments when it might seem that progress toward a better world for animals threatens to take a step back. That is sometimes the case with the fashion industry, where what’s in and what’s out is always shifting. Recently, a few articles suggested that fur may be making a comeback. At first glance, these pieces, with their provocative headlines, can feel like a slap in the face of progress for the animal welfare movement. But it’s essential to keep in mind a bigger picture.
Here’s what’s crucial to understand from articles suggesting fur is back: The “fur look” being worn today by runway models isn’t new fur from animals such as mink, foxes, raccoon dogs, chinchillas or rabbits on fur farms, where they are raised just to be killed and skinned. The catwalk scene represents the fur “look” using faux fur and shearling, which is a coproduct of the meat and wool industries that involves cruelty and animal death but does not require the farming and killing of animals solely for their fur.
This shift in approach clearly illustrates how many designers are keen to steer clear of cruel animal fur. Even Fendi, a brand with a history of using animal fur, has been using materials that look like animal fur in place of the real thing. Frankly, the fashion industry no longer needs the fur industry. A deeper dive into data and policy about fur brings us closer to the truth.
Humane World for Animals
In the last decade, the number of animals confined and killed on fur farms globally has gone down 85%, from approximately 140 million animals in 2014 to around 20 million in 2023. In the U.S., the number of animals killed for their fur is at its lowest point since this record-keeping began, with a data set going back to the 1960s.
While 20 million animals being killed every year solely for their fur is still way too high, it’s an astounding decline that promises to continue because of the policies we have helped to put into place already, as well as future ones.
Humane World for Animals
Public opinion in countries around the world is firmly opposed to fur trade cruelty, and to align their practices with consumer values, most major brands, retailers and international design houses have already publicly shunned fur and committed to going fur-free. Financial institutions—including ING (a giant multinational banking firm) and the International Finance Corporation (part of the World Bank)—have implemented policies that exclude any funding for the fur trade. All that momentum has led cities, states and countries to enact laws banning fur farms or the sale of new fur apparel—including online sales.
Today, 22 countries have banned fur farming, and fur sales have been banned in Israel, California and 16 cities across the U.S. In addition, a bill to ban fur imports and sales will be debated in the UK Parliament, and Switzerland’s Federal Council advanced a proposal to end its fur imports—and more bans like these are going to pass in the near term.
Given this crackdown on the use of animal fur in fashion, it only makes sense that fashion designers are increasingly turning to faux fur as a humane and ecofriendly alternative to animal fur. The fur sales bans in place do not prevent people from wearing used, secondhand fur, which carries its own set of ethical and environmental problems. Still, it’s worth remembering that the use of secondhand fur is not going to reverse these sweeping laws and policies throughout the world that crack down on the production of new fur products in the fur trade.
Source: The Fur Free Alliance
As the demand for fur products continues to decline worldwide, the fur trade is bleeding money, losing its luxury status, and increasingly constrained by a web of policies put into place to prevent it from being as profitable as it once was. It’s unsurprising that the fur industry will tout fur’s revival while hanging on to the possibility that people have forgotten the terrible reality of fur farms or remain ignorant of the extreme suffering caused by leg-hold traps. But the cruelty, environmental damage and risk to public health inherent to the fur trade is not so easy to forget, and it’s not likely that people will ever welcome that kind of baggage back into their wardrobes.
That’s why we are determined to achieve the end of animal fur in fashion in societies everywhere, pushing more fur-free policies and more fur sales bans, to stop fur from ever making a comeback.
