Your Fur Coat
Grande Prairie Animal Rights Crew
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How did you get your fur coat?

Trapping: Most animals used for their fur start out in the wild. One day, a mother mink is wandering the forest, scavenging for food for her babies, and suddenly, SNAP! A steel leghold trap slams shut on her leg. The first instinct for an animal to do when hurt is to attack the predator. In this case, the small creature tries biting the trap, often causing teeth to break and gums to bleed. The only thing left for a chance to escape is to gnaw the leg in the trap, hoping to get free. If it works, the animal usually dies of blood loss, parasitic or bacterial infection, or other things. If it doesn't work, however, the furbearing animal may lay in the trap for up to a week, without food or water,  in intense pain, until the trapper comes to retrieve it.
At the fur farm: Once the animal is retrieved by the fur rancher, it goes into a tiny cage, usually approxitmately 2x2. There, it sits, for weeks or months. Food is often mouldy or otherwise unedible, water frozen or scarce, and the tiny cage's wire floor, coated with feces and urine. though the ranchers say they treat the furbearers well because they can't afford to damage the coats, it remains untrue. The ranchers can easily wash the filth from the fur. Thousands of foxes, minks, beavers, raccoons, and other animals have been seen, in undercover investigations, pacing back and forth from boredom and insanity, unable to turn around in the tiny cages, and many even resorting to canniblization due to lack of food or water. The animals recieve no veterinary care in most cases, and no protection from the rain, wind, snow, or harsh summer sun. Millions die each year for fur, and that's not including the many that die from dehydration, pnemonia, disease, starvation/malnutrition, freezing, heat stroke, etc.
The final cut: Finally, after so long trapped in a hellish spiral, the animals are freed from the cage, only to meet their death. Furbearers are dragged, one at a time, out of the cage, and into a shed. It is then thrown on a table and killed. Doesn't sound so bad, yet. But the methods of killing in most fur farms are not humane or approved by veterinarians, wildlife biologists, scientists, or the law. Though the form of euthinisation should be done by a needle, which gives the animal a quick, painless death, is humane and only a few cents per animal, hundreds or thousand of fur farmers are not willing to spend those few extra pennies. Instead, genital electrocution and neck-breaking are the most common methods used. Neck breaking is simply as it sounds, the farmer places his hands around the animal's neck, and while holding it with one hand, snaps the neck to the side with the other. Sometimes, this does not even kill the animal, just paralyze it.
Genital electrocution. Used to save pennies, but also so it does not "damage" the coat. An alligator clip is attached to the animal's anus or genitals, and another is clipped onto it's tongue. Thousands of volts then course through the furry creature's body. Many fur farm workers and invesigators explain that "after the shock, the fox/mink/other animal lies there, twitching for about ten or fifteen minutes.". Often, this only stuns, not kills it, leaving it to be skinned alive.
Afterwards, the fat, meat, and bones are ground up to feed the other prisoners of the farm.Please do not condone this kind of excruciating pain and horrifyng abuse, and ditch the fur. Don't let the cold penetrate your heart.

Fox in the wild, free and happy
From this...

Silver fox with leg caught painfully in steel-hold
To this...

Silver fox with mouth tied shut
To this...

Silver fox eating cagemate
To this...

Tub of fox skins
To this...

Please, for the sake of the animals, ditch the fur
To this!

How could you? Buying fur is turning this...

Please don't buy fur or fur trim!
Into this. Fur is not "pretty" or "classy". It's murder.

Visit for videos, photos, facts, and info. Order a "Fur Hurts" package; You get 250 "Fur Hurts" cards for free! Put them in fur coat pockets in stores, windows, lockers, magazines at the dentist's office, be creative!