NEWS AND COMMENT-QUEEN VICTORIA MARKET, MELBOURNE AUSTRALIA: Gloves trimmed with genuine domestic and stray cat fur are on sale at the Queen Victoria Market in Melbourne. They are marketed as fake (faux) fur but when they were tested by an American laboratory the fur trimming was found to be genuine and that of a cat. I have made a presumption that this is domestic or stray cat fur for the reasons stated below.
The big question which has not been addressed by the news media is where the cat fur came from. And in my mind, there can be only one source: China. We know that Australia trade with China. We know that China brutally kills domestic and stray cats in the south of the country for cat meat. It seems logical to me that the fur from these cats finds its way to Australia where it is used as trimming for gloves or gloves are manufactured in China from domestic cat fur and they are exported to Australia.
There is also no doubt in my mind that domestic cat fur trimming on gloves is present in retailers throughout the West including America and perhaps in Europe and the UK.
I can remember a story I wrote many years ago about the extraordinary fact that genuine domestic cat fur is cheaper to the manufacturers of clothes accessories than faux fur. So, it is market forces which dictates that genuine fur is used. This points to millions of domestic cats being killed resulting in a huge supply of skins. Why is nobody looking into this? Why doesn’t the news media write about this after digging around a bit? Answer: because they are not interested. It seems that the world accepts this animal cruelty. What does it take to heighten interest in those people who can do something about it?
It’s all very well to hold your hands up in shock at supposedly faux fur trimming on gloves being for sale in Australia but where do they come from? Who’s at fault?
In this instance, the gloves are for sale at AU$20 at this marketplace. The discovery was made thanks to a joint investigation by the Collective Fashion Justice group and the Animal Justice Party. As mentioned, they sent the gloves for testing to a forensic lab in the US.
Queen Victoria Market released a statement saying that it was unaware that the items contained genuine cat fur. They stated that they don’t condone the sale of any goods of this type and they work with traders and authorities to resolve these sorts of situations. Bland words indeed. But what are they doing about it? It can’t be that hard to track down the source of the gloves or the source of the fur.
The Animal Justice Party’s MP Andy Meddick has called for a ban on fur in the state of Victoria. Clearly the gloves have been mislabelled as containing faux fur. It is stated that many Australians would not buy the gloves if they knew that it was genuine fur.
Collective Fashion Justice director Emma Hakansson said: “We have no doubt this issue is widespread across the state”. Like I said, it is not just widespread across the state of Victoria in Australia. In general, businesses are unethical when it comes animal welfare. Their priority is their profit margin. If they can maximise profit margin by buying a cheaper component to their product, they will do so even in the knowledge that it is a product that has been acquired on the back of animal cruelty.
Let’s see an investigation and something tangible and concrete done to resolve this. And on this topic, it is well past the time for the international community to do something about the cruelty of cat meat and cat fur production in China. And I have to mention dog meat and fur. Both these animals are equally cruelly abused. These two industrial-sized businesses in China are linked. Logic dictates that. You don’t want to see pictures of cats and dogs at these places because you won’t forget them. They are utterly barbaric, beyond belief and unforgivable
This is not the killing of animals as if you are killing livestock. Sometimes they are a person’s pet and they are invariably killed brutally without any regulations. In fact, as I recall, they are deliberately killed brutally because they believe that the meat taste better when you do it that way.
Some more articles on the fur trade are listed below in a slideshow.
Some more articles on the fur trade are listed below in a slideshow.
