Received: December 09, 2008
Subject: Financial Post's Fur is Green...
Hollie Shaw – Financial Post
You should be commended for putting together the article entitled “Making the case that wearing fur can be eco-friendly” in the Financial Post Friday Dec. 5, 08 edition. From my perspective fur is definitely green.
What most people miss though, including the Fur Council of Canada, is the emphasis should be on the animals’ habitat rather than the animals themselves. This is the approach that Nature has taken for the last few millions of years.
In Ontario and most of Canada wildlife is most at risk due to habitat destruction not from killing individual animals. Your reference to Brenda McNeilly finding killing animals to make a fur coat offensive is the typical reaction in much of urban Canada today. She likely has a collection of shoes made from the hides of animals, leather. She like most people may even feel good and perhaps even sanctimonious about wearing faux fur, cotton,, wool, rayon, spandex, fleece, polyester, and copious other synthetic materials replacing natural clothing materials. Synthetics are often portrayed by the advertising industry as green or eco-friendly.
Now consider that all of the synthetics are oil based. No amount of trappers in Canada could have had the same affect on the environment and wildlife as did on Exxon Valdez. Then there’s cotton. One of the few crops cultivated which neither man nor beast consumes. But cotton consumes enormous quantities of natural habitats. There are areas on this planet totally destroyed by the growth of cotton.
The most environmentally friendly product next to fur in my mind is wool. While the animal does not die as a result of having its wool sheared it will at some point in time. However the production of wool requires vast acreages to it production. These areas are almost void of wildlife species.
Fur on the other hand has a totally different approach. Like Nature a trapper does little to change the forest where the animal is trapped. Yes the animal dies but its habitat is left as it was found and allowed to produce more wildlife, not just the furbearers. In addition there has been very little non-renewable energy invested in the procurement of the fur. No drilling, shipping, processing; no plowing, tilling, spraying, irrigating, transportation and processing. Nature provides much of the energy as it always has done through the food chain and the natural interactions in local ecosystems.
It’s unfortunate that our “civilized” urban culture sees the killing of an individual member of a species as offensive while not being moved in the slightest by the wholesale destruction of whole ecosystems. An analogy that comes to mind is that of a goose sitting on her nest. Should a trapper, hunter, fisherperson come along a take one of her eggs we would find their action appalling in spite of the fact that the goose can and will lay another egg to replace the one lost. However if a developer/industrialist was to destroy the goose itself, hardly a peep would be voiced. Perhaps a better analogy fitting your newspaper’s emphasis and the current economic crisis would be that we are scandalized by the concept of spending the interest but have no concerns with squandering the principal of our investments.
Parts of Nature may not be pretty but they work very well and have been doing so for millions of years. Our moral indignation only started in the last 50 of so years. Who do you think is right, Nature or “civilized man”.
John McKenzie
Kemptville Ontario