It has been announced that the Hudson Bay Company, which received its charter in 1670, is the oldest incorporated joint-stock merchandising company in the English-speaking world, and was instrumental in the development of my country, Canada, has failed to make rent on several of its large department stores. This reflects the double whammy of people moving to online purchasing starting years ago and augmented by the current COVID-19 pandemic. While the company began as a fur-trading business, it’s far from that now – an iconic chain of big-box brick and mortar department stores – and threatens to join the ranks of businesses and institutions Canadians of my generation once assumed would always exist.
As I wrote in my last blog, Canadians, especially us older ones, are indoctrinated in childhood history lessons to value the importance of furs to our origin and the romanticized exploits of the European explorers and colonists who combed the vast wilderness searching for its rich profusion of mammals whose furry skins were cherished abroad.
About 40 years ago, when the anti-fur movement was a youthful David pitted against a towering and ruthless fur industry Goliath, I somehow secured an internal document the fur industry never, ever, expected to be accessed by those of us opposed to the fur trade. That document was a commissioned study telling the fur industry what to do – and not to do – to counter “anti-fur propaganda.” Most importantly, it advised furriers not to connect actual, living animals with furs in the minds of potential buyers. Furs were often trimmed, dyed, woven, or otherwise manipulated to alter their natural appearance. My grandmother’s marten stole that I remember from preschool childhood, with heads and tiny paws attached, fell from contrived fashion.
People were more likely to buy furs when they associated finished products with the welfare and traditions of native trappers and when they associated the production of fur garments with skilled craftsmanship. While animals were best not mentioned at all, if they had to be it was best to emphasize that Canadian furs were from common species; imply that fur trapping somehow served conservation interests; and assert that the animals were humanely “dispatched” (read: killed). Several decades ago, in times I remember were quite different from now, even humane and animal protection organizations were saying if you must buy furs, buy “ranched” or “farmed” furs, since they supposedly did not have an impact on the environment and the animals were well cared for and humanely killed.
None of this had much, if any, relationship with the truth.
I recall attending a meeting in Ottawa, again some 30-odd years ago, when a First Nations representative stated that “animal rights activists” had ruined business for native trappers of arctic foxes. This sounded suspicious to me; no group that I was aware of had targeted either arctic foxes or aboriginal trappers. So, I investigated.
The fur industry had been misrepresenting the situation to both native trappers and the rest of the world. Value of wild caught arctic fox furs had indeed plummeted, but I learned the real reason why upon visiting a fur research facility of the Ontario government. I was taken to a room filled with pelts and shown a bunch of snow-white furs. “Tell me what species those are,” a biologist said, “and if you’re correct, we’ll talk.” I passed the test. They were red fox furs, of a strain bred to produce white fur. And, because they were from captive animals, I was told, they were cleaner, more uniform, and better prepared than the pelts of the smaller, wild arctic foxes from northern traplines. They could be produced closer to fur auction houses, therefore cutting shipping costs and in dependable numbers calibrated to meet demand. In the best tradition of capitalism, they out-competed the less desirable, less suitable arctic fox pelts to the detriment of native trappers, who were told that urban animal rights activists in large organization were responsible for their loss of income. Similar things were happening with mink and other species.
The fur industry was far more damaging to the interests of the native trapper than animal protectors could ever be.
But, that was then.
Now, we are in the midst of the worst pandemic in a century. I also lived in the North American epicenter for a warning precursor, the SARS epidemic of 2003, which caused 43 deaths in Canada, mostly in the Greater Toronto Area where I live. The research at the time showed the illness spread from caged civets in Asia.
Flash forward to the present and we find the virus in mink “farmed” for the fur industry, with animals on nearly 60 mink farms in North Jutland, Denmark alone testing positive for COVID-19 by early October, and thousands more of the animals dying from the same cause in fur farms in Utah and Wisconsin at the same time, and elsewhere, to be sure. We don’t need fur garments at all, and we certainly don’t need them if their production furthers pandemics.
Although I don’t get out birding as much as I did in my youth, I’ve seen more mink and beavers than I used to in the wild. More foxes and coyotes, too. Even marten, and I’m hoping to soon see a fisher. We’ll never restore the more primal world that was here before those first commercial trappers arrived from Europe. So much of what they saw, including entire species, is forever gone. We continue to be destructive in so very many ways, and are slow to learn the lessons of history. But, we do sometimes progress and now, here in Canada as temperatures drop, it is increasingly less common to see fashion furs. Much work is to be done, but we’re doing it.
Keep Wildlife in the Wild,
Barry
