Zac Posen For Fur-Free Couture
Susan Posen, CEO
Zac Posen
New York, NY 10013
Dear Ms. Posen,
Please finally initiate for this winter a permanent fur-free policy. Calvin Klein, Tommy Hilfiger, J. Crew, Ann Taylor, Polo Ralph Lauren, Stella McCartney, Vivienne Westwood, Todd Oldham, Marc Bouwer, and other popular designers market sophisticated collections without real fur. I urge Zac Posen to choose conscientious couture over pain and suffering.
Fur represents the annual slaughter of some 40 million animals. Fur trim is
not an innocuous byproduct as the industry claims. Over 80% of farmed foxes
wind up as decorative trim.
With no legal/ethical standards to oversee the industry, fur farms are
low-budget operations where caged animals live stacked in rows in open
sheds. Intensively confined their entire lives, they frantically pace in
feces, urine, rusty cans. Some perish from dehydration, starvation or
self-mutilation.
Wild animals normally travel miles each day, raise their young, burrow, dig, and express other traits. On fur farms, they're denied all natural behaviors and resort to coping mechanisms such as constant pacing, head bobbing, self-mutilation, infanticide, cannibalism.
Death by genital electrocution is used to ensure undamaged pelts. A metal
conductor is lodged in the animal's throat and an electric prod is pushed
inside the rectum. The killer flips a switch to blast 240 volts of
electricity through the animal's body. The electrical current only works as
a paralyzing agent. The animal remains conscious for two or more minutes to
feel the excruciating force of massive heart attack.
Other fur-bearing animals die by cervical dislocation (neck-popping), lethal injection of junk chemicals such as pesticides, or unfiltered carbon
monoxide asphyxiation.
Animals trapped in the wild suffer no less. Those not immediately crushed in leghold traps or snares gnaw their teeth to the jawbone or chew off their feet to escape. They later die of blood loss or infection. Any who survive mutilation, exposure or starvation are clubbed, crushed (trappers stomp them to death) or drowned after languishing on trap lines for days.
Moreover, indiscriminate trapping devices snap shut on dogs, cats, deer,
livestock and 2 to 10 times as many non-target animals. Endangered species
are among the millions of "trash animals" dumped by trappers every year.
I cannot in good conscience purchase Zac Posen designs as long as the
company supports the violent fur industry. Please let me know about any
plans to implement a fur-free policy.
Sincerely,
