The reality of the fur industry

[spiderbabyx]

The really sad thing, is that this is the absolute "tamest" of this sort of film that I could find. This is happening here, in America. The ones from other countries are far worse. They are far crueler, clubbing the animals to death, even skinning them alive. I debated posting them, as well, but they were just so horrible, I couldn't even watch

Comments

[jo_lfs]

This reminds me of the old stories about how the fur traders decimated the herds on the great plains. 350,000 or so buffalo killed in a matter of a few years, all for just thier hides. The traders would come with thier long barrelled rifles, capable of killing a bull from almost a mile out and let loose on the herds killing indiscriminantly. After they had spent all thier ammunition, they would peel the skin back around the neck of the animal and tie thier horses to the unfolded areas of skin before whipping them away and literally tearing the skin from the buffalo, at which point they would just leave - leaving the entire carcass there to rot, with several hundred others from each 'hunt'.

And they wondered then why Lakota, Cheyenne, Arapaho and even Crow carried the war pipe together in the Powder River country. Heh.

You see the problem is this: as soon as something is put on 'farm status', it has already grown to a point of being a problem for the balance of the things around it. The people of the East and of Europe wanted buffalo hides, and so not only the buffalo, but the Indians, the wolves, the birds and even the ground itself (which was basically 'ploughed' by the unimaginable size of the travelling herds) suffered for it. If the people of the East had just said, 'you know, we have cotton and linen... and deer and sheep skin... good enough!' then everything would have been fine. But the need for conformity and 'fashion' made the hide trade grow to such a monstrous proportion.

For centuries, the people of the plains lived in harmony with the buffalo - eating them, living off of them, using them for everything, literally... the buffalo only began to diminish and dwindle when the greed of mens hearts became greater than thier right to survive, and the right to survive of those who lived around them.

And of course nobody said anything about it, because a rather handy little biproduct of the buffalo being exterminated, was the starving out of and denial of shelter and commerce to the entire Sioux and Cheyenne nations, heh.

My point is - all things in moderation are fair... the problem is, humans as a whole suffer from an 'I want that' complex - and the sheer volume of humans means that this makes wholesale farming nescessary in the eyes of those who would make a profit from it. Hunting is not the issue - farming is. A cat has no qualms in killing a mouse to eat, but I have never yet witnessed a group of cats sit down and draw up plans for a mouse farm.

And unfortunatley, until people can be taught to live within thier lot and be content in thier place and station, such problems will only multiply, because the advent of wholesale farming of both food and goods means another thing - and advent of an unprecedented population growth - an even larger generation of people who do not love nature nor understand thier place within it.