DawnWatch: Fox 5 and ABC cover not so faux fur 2/9 – 2/10/07
February 11th, 2007 10:17 pm by Kelly Garbato———- Forwarded message ———-
From: DawnWatch – news [at] dawnwatch.com
Date: Feb 11, 2007 8:40 PM
Subject: DawnWatch: Fox 5 and ABC cover not so faux fur 2/9 – 2/10/07
Late last year, the Humane Society of the United States found that retailers were running ads for jackets advertised as having faux fur trim, when in fact, the jackets were trimmed with real fur. Fox 5 in Washington DC has done a terrific job staying on top of the unfolding story.
The Fox series has told us that a labeling loophole allows coats with less than $150 worth of fur not to be labeled as including fur. They explained that means a coat could get through without a fur label even if it included the skins of thirty rabbits, or three raccoons, three red foxes or one bear.
The station’s most recent piece on the issue, which aired on Saturday, February 10, tells us:
“The Humane Society said it subjected 25 fur trim jackets from 20 different retail chains to mass spectometry testing and found that all of them were either falsely advertised as fake fur when they were not, or mislabeled as a legal fur like raccoon when in fact they were dog fur. In most cases they were raccoon dog, a species from china that looks like a raccoon but is in fact part of the dog family.”
The reporter, Patrick McGrath, reminds us that it is illegal to sell dog or cat fur in the USA.
The HSUS’s Mike Markarian says in the piece “Even though it is a type of dog it is often passed off as raccoon fur. These animals are killed in the most gruesome of ways, including being skinned alive.”
A mother who had bought a coat for her daughter thinking it was trimmed with raccoon said they cried when they found out it was a raccoon dog, and the daughter said:
“I don’t want this fur any more, these animals need it more than I do.”
Though I am always uncomfortable with news items that suggest that the suffering of some species is more important than others, at least the coverage does remind people that fur once belonged to living beings. One gets the impression that the daughter quoted above is unlikely to pick up a coat made of another species. Further, so much fur coming out of China comes from the raccoon dog, this expose should have an impact on the whole Chinese fur industry — so it is bound to be helpful for the animals overall.
You can watch Fox 5 DC’s latest piece on the issue on line at tinyurl.com/yry5kz.
Please thank the station for its continued coverage. Click here and choose “newscasts” from the pull-down menu.
ABC’s “Good Morning America” also covered the story on Friday, February 9.
It included this quote from HSUS’s Wayne Pacelle: “The images that are investigators have seen in China are chilling — animals skinned alive for a product when we have an alternative for these days.”
You can watch it on line here.
And then please thank Good Morning America. Go to abc.go.com/site/contactus.html and choose “Good Morning America” from the pull-down menu.
Yours and the animals’,
Karen Dawn
(DawnWatch is an animal advocacy media watch that looks at animal issues in the media and facilitates one-click responses to the relevant media outlets. You can learn more about it, and sign up for alerts at www.DawnWatch.com. You may forward or reprint DawnWatch alerts if you do so unedited — leave DawnWatch in the title and include this parenthesized tag line. If somebody forwards DawnWatch alerts to you, which you enjoy, please help the list grow by signing up. It is free!)
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Tagged: animals animal rights animal welfare action alerts dawnwatch fur fur trim racoon racoon fur racoon dog dog fur cat fur dog canine cat feline HSUS Humane Society of the United States rabbit rabbit fur fox fox fur bear bear fur faux fur China ABC Good Morning America Wayne Pacelle
