animals in the news
Maurice Chittenden
Protesters attack 'cruellest' trend
ANIMAL welfare campaigners are planning attacks on fashion houses which have forsaken mink and fox for the latest luxury trim: the fleeces of new-born and aborted lambs.
A surge in the use of astrakhan - what fashionistas call the new “fur” - on the catwalks of Milan and Paris means death for thousands of spring lambs in the desert wastes of Uzbekistan 2,500 miles away.
The wool of the karakul lamb - most are black - is so soft and curly that it resembles crushed velvet.
Animal rights groups claim some furriers are not even willing to wait for the ewes to give birth. They have collected evidence that sheep have their throats cut so the unborn foetuses can be cut from their wombs. These have the softest, most valuable fleeces.
Fashion writers have been surprised at the amount of astrakhan on parade over the past fortnight. It has been used to make whole coats, as collars on jackets and even as trim on evening dresses. “It is the
cruellest and most vicious fur,” said Claudia Croft, fashion editor of The Sunday Times Style magazine.
Astrakhan was in limited use three years ago but fell out of vogue after Stella McCartney, the British designer, rounded on her friend Madonna for having an astrakhan coat, telling her she was “wearing a foetus”. She has never been seen in public in it since.
The animal activists believe designers, wary of using fur, have switched to lambskin because they can justify it as a by-product of the food industry like cow leather or pigskin.
The fashion houses, which have found demand particularly strong from the wives of Russian oil millionaires, can buy a baby lamb “pelt” for between £30 and £45. A coat made from the pelts will sell for £3,500-£4,500 or much more if it has a label like Dolce & Gabbana or Prada.
Judging by the amount of it sent down the catwalk recently, fashion houses are predicting astrakhan will be the must-have fashion item next winter.
In Paris last week designers, including Karl Lagerfeld and Jean Paul Gaultier, draped their models in astrakhan coats.
Chloë Sevigny, the American actress and the houses’ new muse, led D&G’s models down the catwalk in what one fashion writer described as “a herd’s worth of astrakhan”. It was even sewn on to chiffon dresses.
Prada produced an ultraviolet astrakhan coat trimmed with Mongolian lamb.
It is already provoking a backlash. Anna Wintour, the British editor-in-chief of American Vogue, was attacked when she turned up at a Lagerfeld show in a lamb’s wool jacket dyed pink. A woman shoved food in
her face and shouted: “That’s for all the little animals.”
The week before, activists from People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (Peta) took over a window of Prada’s flagship store in Milan, smearing themselves with blood and carrying slogans declaring “Death for
Sale”.
Sean Gifford, Peta’s director of European campaigns, said: “The fur trade is a violent, bloody business but these skins are particularly gruesome.
“Upwards of 4m lambs are slaughtered every year for these coats. A ewe can usually have four births in a lifetime. The first three lambs are slaughtered after they are born. But the mother is butchered 15 to 30 days before giving birth to the fourth lamb. The unborn lamb is then ripped from her belly. Its skin has
not had a chance to develop so it is softer and more highly valued.”
Rick Swain, an investigator for the Humane Society of the United States, visited a karakul farm in Uzbekistan posing as the owner of a chain of boutiques, making a video of what he saw. “I insisted on seeing the slaughterhouse,” he said. “We could hear what sounded like the cries of lambs as we were led into this 20ft by 20ft building with hooks in the ceiling. “The floor was covered with blood and there were carcasses of dead baby lambs.”
Fashion houses were reluctant to discuss their use of astrakhan. D&G had no comment and Prada said it “did not have information available”.
Andrea Martin, of the British Fur Trade Association, claimed the killing of the ewe had been staged for Swain’s video. She added: “Karakul sheep and lambs provide an important source of food as well as other income from skins and wools. In Muslim areas, including Uzbekistan, slaughtering methods for animals
are governed by strict religious principles intended to assure humane treatment of the animals. Allegations of mistreatment and induced abortions make no sense.”
Jonathan Leake, Times Science Editor
ONCE they were a byword for mindless docility. But cows have a secret mental life in which they bear grudges, nurture friendships and become excited over intellectual challenges, scientists have found.
Cows are also capable of feeling strong emotions such as pain, fear and even anxiety - they worry about the future. But if farmers provide the right conditions, they can also feel great happiness.
The findings have emerged from studies of farm animals that have found similar traits in pigs, goats, chickens and other livestock. They suggest that such animals may be so emotionally similar to humans that
welfare laws need to be rethought.
Christine Nicol, professor of animal welfare at Bristol University, said even chickens may have to be treated as individuals with needs and problems.
“Remarkable cognitive abilities and cultural innovations have been revealed,” she said. “Our challenge is to teach others that every animal we intend to eat or use is a complex individual, and to adjust our
farming culture accordingly.”
Nicol will be presenting her findings to a scientific conference to be held in London next month by Compassion in World Farming, the animal welfare lobby group.
John Webster, professor of animal husbandry at Bristol, has just published a book on the topic, Animal Welfare: Limping Towards Eden. “People have assumed that intelligence is linked to the ability to
suffer and that because animals have smaller brains they suffer less than humans. That is a pathetic piece of logic,” he said.
Webster and his colleagues have documented how cows within a herd form smaller friendship groups of between two and four animals with whom they spend most of their time, often grooming and licking each other. They will also dislike other cows and can bear grudges for months or years.
Dairy cow herds can also be intensely sexual. Webster describes how the cows become excited when one of the herd comes into heat and start trying to mount her. “Cows look calm, but really they are gay
nymphomaniacs,” he said.
Donald Broom, professor of animal welfare at Cambridge University, who is presenting other research at the conference, will describe how cows can also become excited by solving intellectual challenges. In one study, researchers challenged the animals with a task where they had to find how to open a door to get some food. An electroencephalograph was used to measure their brainwaves.
“Their brainwaves showed their excitement; their heartbeat went up and some even jumped into the air. We called it their Eureka moment,” said Broom.
The assumption that farm animals cannot suffer from conditions that would be considered intolerable for humans is partly based on the idea that they are less intelligent than people and have no “sense of self”.
Increasingly, however, research reveals this to be untrue. Keith Kendrick, professor of neurobiology at the Babraham Institute in Cambridge, has found that even sheep are far more complex than realised and can remember 50 ovine faces - even in profile. They can recognise another sheep after a year apart. Kendrick has also described how sheep can form strong affections for particular humans, becoming depressed by long
separations and greeting them enthusiastically even after three years.
The Compassion in World Farming conference will be opened with a keynote speech by Jane Goodall, the primatologist who founded the study of animal sentience with her research into chimpanzees in the early 1960s.
Goodall overturned the then accepted belief that animals were simply automatons showing little individuality or emotions. It has taken many years, however, for scientists to accept that such ideas could be applied to a wide range of other animals.
“Sentient animals have the capacity to experience pleasure and are motivated to seek it,” said Webster. “You only have to watch how cows and lambs both seek and enjoy pleasure when they lie with their heads raised to the sun on a perfect English summer’s day. Just like humans.”
I've been dreaming about zombies, and demons in the face of the moon, and the Great Old Ones waking up.