By Ingrid E. Newkirk
President
People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals
When there's a cold snap, and the newspapers print features with large photos on the season's new crop of furs, I think back to fox who crossed my path and taught me what all must learn if we hope to make a difference in the world: We must always speak out against what is cruel and unjust.
I met the fox nearly decade before I began People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, and though I may raise a few eyebrows with this admission, I did at that time own two furs. Mr. Velvet, as the fox came to be called, forced me to face the truth about the skins hanging in my closet.
He was a city fox, a phantom of the urban jungle. A being few people saw and few would believe existed, an untamed creature who still ran and hunted and existed as part of a family somehow in a sea of concrete and highway traffic. Not that this red fox had come to the city. The city had come to him, as it had to all the opossums, chipmunks, squirrels and birds, who had awakened one morning to find buildings going up where once they had played in the morning sun, caught insects for supper and raised their babies in peace.
All that remained of his homeland was a clump of woods the size of a convenience store parking lot. Almost overnight, he and his family had become invisible prisoners of people using the pay phones, grabbing a newspaper or throwing their trash in the dumpster behind a store. The residents of the new apartment block had worn a trail through his tiny lump of greenery to make the convenience store even more convenient. Beside that trail, two teenagers had set up traps that they'd purchased for a few dollars at the hardware store, just for fun.
It was the summer of 1972. The red fox's fate fell in my hands, as I was the humane officer on duty.
The moment I saw him I knew he was in deep trouble. He was propping himself up against a tree trunk, panting hard, as if concentrating on alleviating his pain. When he knew that I was not going to keep walking past, he moved quickly to right himself, but the shooting pain in his foot reminded him that escape was impossible. Crouching down a few feet away, I tried to look much smaller.
His eyes were wide as saucers and his tongue pounded the air with each labored breath. Yet instead of starting or jumping about, he stood stock still as I took the syringe from my pocket and inserted the needle into his thigh.
We waited together quietly, neither of us moving. Then this beautiful, once whole being surrendered to the drug, closing his eyes and slumping into the small carpet of leaves now stained with his blood. When he awoke he would be in a different world, one of medicines, cages and human noises. One that might prove too much for a wild being to endure.
I lifted him in my arms and carried him to the van. There, it took all my strength to open the tip pan and release the crushed white bones of his paw from the steel trap. Driving back to the vet's office, I thought back, regretfully to when I was 17, and living in England. Wanting to look grown-up and chic, I had purchased a cream wrap-around coat with a silver fox stole collar. I remember pulling up the collar and rubbing my face against the deep silky fur of the two matching fox skins.
In time, still unaware of the suffering involved in the their making, I had bought another fur in a period clothing store: a gorgeous, rich brown coat with huge padded shoulders in the style of Ginger Rogers. It was hand-stitched from the pelts of almost 100 squirrels, their tiny bodies lined up from my chin to my knees.
Watching the injured fox in the back of the van that day, I realized I had not stopped wearing fur for the animals' sake, but only because I was too busy to dress up anymore.
Miraculously, the red fox survived. The veterinary staff who saw him through the amputation of his leg named him "Mr. Velvet." When his wound healed into a smooth stump just below his knee he was transferred from his hospital cage to a large outdoor pen where, once again, he could feel the dirt under his feet.
That winter, Mr. Velvet was released into a protected woods. He looked back only once, straight into the moist eyes of his rehabilitator, before hop-running away to freedom.
After he had gone, I plucked up my courage and began approaching people wearing fur. As politely as possible, I asked them if they had ever thought what it must be like to feel metal biting into their feet, or to face life in a small cage, then have it end in suffocation, electrocution or with a "snap" as neck separated from spine. I was not mean or condemnatory, yet I often felt embarrassed, awkward, ridiculous; until I remembered why I was speaking up. I have since come to believe that those of us who abhor cruelty are obliged to talk to people in fur. The Mr. Velvets of the world have no voice but ours, and their right to be spared unspeakable suffering must override any human desire to be left in peace to support atrocities. ",”
2004-2-0″
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