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Fur

What's your opinion of fur?

  • I love fur! Bring on the dead animals!

    Votes: 4 13.3%
  • I think fur is beautiful, but I'd never wear it myself

    Votes: 4 13.3%
  • Indifferent

    Votes: 9 30.0%
  • I'm against fur.

    Votes: 13 43.3%
  • I'm not from the Western world and in our culture fur is considered acceptable

    Votes: 0 0.0%

  • Total voters
    30

Thalassa

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I've decided that I think sheepskin is okay, too, even though sheepies are cute. People eat lamb (I eat lamb) and wear wool, and sheepskin fur hats apparently can be made quite cheaply and are excellent to have in very cold climates.
 

Thalassa

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I want a huge fur cape, a horned helmet, and meat and potatoes every day for breakfast.

:laugh: :wubbie:

For some reason I'm deeply amused by this fantasy. It resonates with me on some level.

*sigh* I do love animals though. Skinning videos (the little that I could tolerate enough to watch) are brutal and heartbreaking. They made want to be vegan for awhile. I don't know what's stopping me from trying harder.

Being properly vegan is fucking expensive. It costs extra money to get proper nutrition as a total vegan because it's not natural for humans. I had a physician inform me that veganism was only healthy if you could devote to it as though it were a part-time job. There's also a link between brain and nervous system disorders with people who don't consume ANY animal products (this does not include lacto-ovo vegetarians or lacto-vegetarians, of course). I tend to often think "OH that's what's wrong with them..." I've tried vegan a few times temporarily for health reasons and it always cost me extra money and made me feel weak and weird. I also missed cheese.

I sometimes wonder if people who can't deal with fur or leather AT ALL should even eat meat - or maybe they should learn how to kill their own meat so they're exposed to exactly what they're realistically consuming. As a working class Southerner I grew up somewhat surrounded by hunters.

I also like what Disco Biscuit said about "oh death is okay as long as it's not cute"...it's true. I am guilty of it myself. Like I said, I'd rather wear bear fur than mink.
 

kyuuei

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I don't see anything wrong with using any part of an animal. I don't find it fashionable in the sense that I prefer it over other garb, but I see nothing wrong with using it in clothing.
 

Edasich

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Again, this happens on a vastly more grand scale with meat. All that torture for just one "delicious" steak. Why not throw paint on people at McDonalds?
Fast food chains are targeted.

Anyway, what I'm trying to say is that even though I still think it is unethical - I can understand people eating meat, with the torture involved, because it's their diet, and diet is important. But things like fashion, and cosmetics which are tested on animals, we clearly do not need! It is absolutely unnecessary. And it makes it all that more cruel.
 

sleepy

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Anyway, what I'm trying to say is that even though I still think it is unethical - I can understand people eating meat, with the torture involved, because it's their diet, and diet is important. But things like fashion, and cosmetics which are tested on animals, we clearly do not need! It is absolutely unnecessary. And it makes it all that more cruel.
Necessary? ehh. Do you think you are necessary? For what exactly?

If you want to be ethical, I see no other way then to do suicide. Anything else, and claiming to be ethical will result in hypocrisy.
 

Edasich

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Necessary? ehh. Do you think you are necessary? For what exactly?

If you want to be ethical, I see no other way then to do suicide. Anything else, and claiming to be ethical will result in hypocrisy.
Trivial.
 
A

A window to the soul

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If helpless, will rescue and luv.

If dead, will make stylish boots or coat or ear muffs or furry bunny slippers or BBQ'd over a mesquite fire...
 

Vasilisa

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But, rather than curtail are greed and deal with the root cause of many of our animal problems we have decided as a society to hide the true cost of our greed from our eyes and have turned to science and technology to limit the negative impacts.
Did you read Matthew Scully's book? I absolutely agree with what you say here, and I believe there is blowback from this every day, in a myriad of ways.

The opposite response has been just as bad. Many of the animal rights activists have really just lowered the value of humans down to the value of animals as opposed to raising animals to the value of humans.
You mean like "a rat is a pig is a dog is a boy"?

A lot of “extreme” AR activists do extreme actions because they feel like nothing else is going to work. How do you get people who don't give a damn to care, to change their ways? It can be very depressing. Mostly now, the first thought that comes to my mind is what sort of human being supports that?

Thats right, they say the media space is so saturated nowadays they have to be outrageous to get any share of it. I'm not defending it, just explaining their logic. I found the documentary of Ingrid Newkirk a fascinating look at some of the thinking behind that particular branch of animal activism. She talks about learning early on that the image (of what is usually hidden) was the most powerful tool they had. It also features the objections of other animal advocates who disagree with PETA's methods.

I have no illusions about what the animals confined in intensive feed and fur operations endure. I think its valuable for people to examine this concealed world which intersects with all our lives.


Incidentally, if anyone watches the entire documentary, it would be interesting to know your thoughts on Ingrid's type.


eta:
Again, this happens on a vastly more grand scale with meat. All that torture for just one "delicious" steak. Why not throw paint on people at McDonalds?
Actually PETA is now a shareholder of McDonalds. I happened to learn this because I had to do a quantity of research on McDonalds for this school term.
 

Randomnity

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Just make sure you boycott the meat industry too (and the resulting animal products)


This affects millions, probably billions of animals more than the fur industry. Admittedly less cute ones, and more tasty ones, but animals nonetheless.

Whenever you industrialize something, everyone and everything involved tends to suffer, unfortunately. The human workers in those factories suffer, too. Not sure how to change it, other than boycotting, and many people will always choose the cheapest option rather than the most ethical one. I'm lumping myself in there too, at least for now.
 

Queen Kat

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A big supermarket concern in the Netherlands just started to boycot bioindustry on animals. Yesterday I saw a picture of their least humane pig farm in the news paper and all of the piggies had enough room to walk around and play. Also, it's illegal to castrate pigs without anaesthesia for two years, I believe. So here we're on our way. It's illegal to breed foxes for fur and breeding minks is getting illegal too. I'm personally glad I live here.
 

Beargryllz

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i think its only right to wear fur when the animal is hunted for food.

We are hunting though. Someone still has to find the animal and process it. What difference is there between a spear, a bow, and a cage? All of these are just tools to make the task of obtaining fur (or meat) easier. Making tasks easier is what humans have become well-known for. We love ingenuity and innovation.
 

INTP

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We are hunting though. Someone still has to find the animal and process it. What difference is there between a spear, a bow, and a cage? All of these are just tools to make the task of obtaining fur (or meat) easier. Making tasks easier is what humans have become well-known for. We love ingenuity and innovation.

because animals suffer when grown in cages, but they can live a normal life when you hunt them.
 

Beargryllz

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I don't believe that the animals being in or not in cages will determine whether or not they will suffer. I'm quite certain that animals experience suffering regardless of any human intervention as a consequence of being alive. I do not understand how you can distinguish between a "normal life" and a caged life, because the result for either individual animal is still the same, they will still be dead and the human will still use that organism for food or clothing. You can't pretend human behavior is any less valid than any other animal behavior and then use that fantasy to justify a separate course of action (free range hunting, for example) that is merely another form of behavior driven by the same end goal. Whether they die in cages or die by the spear, it was human behavior that resulted in the suffering.

I wonder if by removing the human ingenuity from the process and yearning for an idealized environment where we behave with a more primitive set of behaviors and utilize simpler technologies, we can rationalize our actions in a way that makes it acceptable to use other organisms in a way that benefits us. By longing for savagery, practicing killing with savage methods, and believing that such a life is superior, we could manufacture a moral high ground for ourselves, but this is independent from the fate of the animal, which is still going to die.
 

skylights

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i'm not really a fan.

and honestly, it's just easier to avoid fur than it is to avoid meat. i was a vegetarian for years and a vegan for a bit and steering clear of fur is a much easier way to cut unnecessary animal killing than trying to figure out a way to make something on the menu meat-free (at least where i live, lol).

seems to me that the best solution would be to avoid killing as much as is reasonable, and what you do kill, use all of.
 
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I think it's ridiculous to kill something simply because it looks good on you. It's the 21st century and humans have the ability to not only create fabrics to mimic the aesthetics of real fur, but to warm the flesh just as good or better than real fur. However, I can understand those who use real fur for warmth and do not have any other option. But in either case, you won't find me pitching a tent outside some fur-factory.
 

gromit

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I like the way it looks. But I'm not about to go buy some. I'll get fake fur, or I might wear something second hand. MIGHT. I hear it's really warm, and I like being really warm, but also dead animal skin on me is kind of weird. I feel similar about leather.

I'm also vegetarian, so it's probably related.
 

Synarch

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I find it rather inconsistent that people who eat meat and wear leather have a beef with fur. I think the problem most people have with fur is that it seems like a frivolous expression of the way we use animals, but this is a feeling that is inconsistent with eating meat or wearing leather. Eating meat, to the degree that the modern human does, is frivolous.
 

Queen Kat

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This Sunday I went to Amsterdam and I saw hundrerds of people wear real fur. I even saw that they transformed a leather shop into a fur shop. They even used fur to decorate the window. I also saw an art shop, where they exposed a dead, decorated baby goat as a piece of art. I really felt like buying a gun and shooting some fur wearers. The next day I checked out if Peta had some fun merchanizing (too bad they didn't).
 
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