I received one of those emails from a friend – an action email about some kind of suffering or other and to send copies of it to friends and sign a petition etc. The sort of email one will either act on or delete without much thought. The enclosed video was harrowing and horrifying showing a Raccoon dog (it looks a bit like a Raccoon but is a dog) being skinned alive in a fur farm in China. At the end, even after all its feet had been cut off, the animal was still alive and had sobered up after its vain struggles. Like something out of a horror film like “The Fly” it raised its head, blinked with its remaining eyelashes and then lay its head down to continue dying for anything from 10-20 minutes. Yes sir, in Chinese fur farms they are skinning cats and dogs alive. Apparently its easier. Why bother doing anything else? It’s only part of a globalized industrial process with China as a major provider of fur lined clothes that are cheap and fashionable. Since then, a petition is going around and the Chinese embassies have sent out a press release about these “isolated incidents” and why they are concerned about it as much as anyone else. There is no evidence anything is being done about it. People who know the Chinese and some other far eastern countries including Japan and Korea are aware that sometimes they seem to have a “cruelty gene” – and that expression was supplied by a European lady I know once married to a Chinese gentleman. Actually, I think we all have something of the cruelty gene, but according to our culture, will not express this much if at all.
Once upon a time I used to skin dead birds and mammals (mostly things that were found dead) to prepare study skins. Skinning animals is quite important when butchering a large mammal. The worst bit is when the skin comes off the head and you see these dark eyes exposed against the fleshy head. In Siberia, where people breed and herd reindeer and live off them, animals are slaughtered very fast - a slit to the throat. They are not even aware of their fate just before, and die a quick death. All the meat is eaten and the skin is turned into materials and clothing, especially thick warm boots. In the past more than now, the bones were also used. This is the appropriate use of an animal, an appropriate way of dispatch and use of the skin. The native American cultures of the USA had a similar relationship with buffalo. The Chinese fur farms offer no comparison.
Here the carcasses of still living animals are piled high on top of dead ones to rot away and may be even feed the caged ones awaiting a similar fate. The caged animals can see their compatriots being taken out, stamped on and skinned alive and sometimes there is a crowd of people who are laughing (according to the report of this Raccoon dog I read). Young puppies, cats and dogs in a living hell. Sometimes without the skin they even manage to stand.
Our skin is the largest organ of our body. Without it we would die fast enough from dehydration and rapid infection based on conditions. Normally the loss of skin would be associated with death such as in a fire. Few animals in nature would have to face being skinned alive. Once deprived of a skin death is practically guaranteed and it is a painfully slow one in the fur farms. Even though it is easy to see an animal as a body with a skin and see the skin as so much like a garment, it is important to understand that the skin is (as much as a the skeleton) an integral part of the animal; not a superficial addition. Our clothes are superficial but an animal has no clothing. When an animal is skinned, if it is alive, it changes from a whole being into something less, yet conscious.
That skinned, live, animal was probably the most humiliated and deprived creature I had ever seen. Deprived of any kindness or sensitivity, being abased and made a laughing stock and losing the only thing capable of affording it protection against the elements. Yet it bore its last suffering in a sober fashion. What more could it do than to stare at that camera, blink and lie its head down? These acts of mass vandalism are going on right now.
To correctly use an animal perfectly, even if exploiting it fully is to rear it from birth, feed it, take care of it in reasonable circumstances and then kill it without it even knowing, quickly and then to make full use of it. In the USA an autistic woman who understood cattle, recommended a clever method of leading them to the slaughter so that they still had their friends and died fast. In Japan, they produce luxury beef from cattle who are reared like pets in the finest surroundings with fresh grass. Sweden has some of the highest animal welfare standards in the world in the context of agriculture. Each situation has to have its standards: In the UK wanton cruelty to animals is illegal, no skinning of animals alive would be allowed. However, in Nicaragua (as reported in a recent BBC Wildlife magazine) where there are no similar laws, as an example of modern art, the artist starved a dog alive and people were coming and watching the dying exhibit while it was held.
When we go to a supermarket most of the meat has sort of been reared responsibly but as for the fish, well that has probably been caught without much care about animal welfare and with many hundreds of non target species dying in the process. The problem is there is very little legal regulation about fishing conduct or practice, especially in international waters with absolutely no policing except for the likes of Greenpeace. We don’t really think twice about buying four cans of cheap tuna (tuna being higher up in the food chain than mere sardines or plankton) for the price of two. These are wild animals. They have typically not been harvested with sensitivity and nature picks up the tab. We as uneducated consumers continue to think we deserve our healthy cheap food that we pay for that was in effect, stolen from the natural world (historically we only stole a little, now the big ships have bigger appetites). Only ethically sourced and produced fish is OK to eat in these days of industrial fishing I say.
Back to fur farms. It is really very difficult to do anything except to avoid buying clothes from China lined with cheap fur and sign a petition. You could let other people know but then, I am not really too keen for you to see the video I saw. The problem is, when you watch horror movies some of that horror can rub off on you unless you can really come to terms with it with peace, understanding and compassion/love. I feel ashamed to be a human, but I can act in this world most strongly only from being in the human state. Let us try to avoid wanton cruelty and not pretend like some people that life exists to be exploited by our species any way we wish with no thought for consequences. If you think like that, you are not being fully human.
I cannot apologise to that dog on behalf of the human race – god only knows what its final thoughts were as it looked into that camera, but I hope that whatever it was trying to communicate has been appreciated by someone to some extent so as to help prevent such cruelty in the future.
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