The smaller return of the fur |National Geographic Geographic National Geographic

The animal skins are present in nearly two thirds of the parades of the most important female collections of fall-winter 2017. While it was violently criticized in the 1990s, fur is today a force.Our journalist investigated.

On this day in mid-February, he freezes to Pierre Fende.We extract ourselves from a wetland taken by ice over more than 20 cm deep.Bill Mackowski, a trapper for sixty years, practices mainly in the north of the state of Maine.He shows me branches of alder pointing through the ice.The beavers, he explains to me, pick up the woods of the poplars from the first cold, before stacking non-edible alders to bend the poplars under the ice and eat them during the winter.The trapper pierces the frozen surface using an iron bar, then widens the hole and pulls on something.A steel instrument bursts the muddy surface - a brutally closed trap on the neck of a huge beaver.

"This is called super covers," said Bill Mackowski.A beautiful beast.The skin will not bring him more than 25 dollars but, on the way back, he displays satisfaction only thousands of generations of hunters and trappers have experienced in front of their catches.He quotes the words of a visitor who came a previous winter: "If people managed to ignore the death of the beavers, they would pay to come here.»»

In reality, ignoring the death of animals no longer seems to be the concern.Top-models that have laid naked for a campaign affirming "rather naked than in fur" today have their career in fashion fur.Creators who "were afraid of touching it" fifteen or twenty years ago, too, "broken the taboo", explains Dan Mullen, a Canadian vision farmer.

Many players in the sector today admit that the virulent campaigns of anti-Fourrure activists were right on one point: the living conditions of animals in farms were indecent.And to add that trade has changed - what its detractors dispute.In any case, more and more people judge whether or not wearing fur is an individual choice.

The farms dominate the fur market.Their production has more than doubled since the 1990s. In 2015, it reached approximately 100 million skins - especially of mink, and fox to a lesser extent.The trappers added millions of beavers, coyotes, rats washer, musk rats and other wild animals.Not to mention millions and millions of cattle, lambs, rabbits, ostriches, crocodiles, alligators and caimans, killed both for their meat and their skin.

Formerly attribute of winter bourgeois elegance, fur has become hip-hop and young.It is displayed in any season, in all ways: cushions, wallets, keychain, stilettos, sweatshirts, scarves, furniture, lampshades ... There are fur coats with camouflage patterns,arc-en-ciel or worthy of the impossible constructions of M. C. Escher.

How did the fur succeed in this resounding return after the ostracism that struck it in the 1990s?After the disaster reputation acquired in the 1960s, when this trade threatened the survival of the leopard, the ocelot and other species?The use of endangered species was prohibited in the 1970s. But the current renewal is that of a sector that has responded to its detractors - and often playing themselves - while demandNew wealthy was growing in China, South Korea and Russia.

I must admit here that I approach this report with a particular point of view.My great-grandfather was a trapper, and I believe that the intimate knowledge of the things that hunting, fishing and work with living creatures has been largely lost in our urbanized lives.I must add that my wife and I inherited an ocelotal jacket made up of fifteen skins, which haunted us until we gave it to a fauna reserve as an educational object.So I wanted to go see with my own eyes.

I drive in the middle of a snowstorm to the north and Nova Scotia in Canada, one of the skins trade centers.Dan Mullen invited me to see how his visions live.And how they die.

Mullen grew up in the old tradition of visiting visons: long and narrow wooden shelters open to the side, with rows of small narrow cages on both sides.When he launched his own business, he opted for wider cages, like those required in Europe.He installed six rows in long stables over 100 m, with a translucent plastic roof.

Several times a day, an employee drives a small vehicle along the aisles, placing a scientifically developed meal on the roof of each cage (it looks like raw hamburger).Driving out of frost provides water 24 hours a day. Under the cages, a mobile gutter carries the excrement, transformed into fertilizers or electricity in a biodigester (ministerral producing gas).

These changes have largely occurred under pressure from defenders of animal welfare.But breeders have often been able to take advantage of it.For example, Mullen's cages are all equipped with a height shelf which allows the nursing mother to move away from her young (less disturbed mothers raise healthy children).In the cage, toys reduce stress, which would give better quality skins.Paradox: the players in the sector boast of reforms to which their old opponents have forced them.

Dan Mullen's visons are of surprising size and health.They measure double their wild fellows, and have great curious faces.They are nonetheless condemned.I came to see them die.

Employees wear welding gloves to avoid bites.They go from cage to cage, and raise each animal through the base of the tail.A few animals grow strident cries, but most are visibly used to this treatment until they fall through the swinging door of the assigned box like packages in a mailbox.Carbon monoxide makes them lose consciousness in less than sixty seconds.A few minutes later, they died.

"For other species," explains Dan Mullen, animals are often transported by truck over hundreds of kilometers to the slaughterhouse, and it's horrible and bloody.What you see is the least cruel breeding animal felling.The next day, we visit the treatment plant.Machines remove the skin from each corpse and remove it from a single piece, like a T-shirt.

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The largest furs auction house in the world is Kopenhagen Fur, in Denmark.A chain made up of robots, x -ray devices, imaging technology and humans offers 6.8 million skins for sale.With a barcode linked to the breeder, these have been classified into fifty-two categories, and divided into thousands of lots for auction.In the auction room, buyers consult their catalogs, joke and maneuver to obtain the coveted lots.

Kick is a workshop working for the Kopenhagen Fur.There, Ran Fan, a designer from Beijing, cuts the skin with a lavender color.It makes a kind of trellis for a light jacket."I love fur," she said, in tune with her clientele who loves bright colors and unusual models.Chinese consumers buy half of world fur production.

The revival of fur is largely explained by its seduction strategy with young creators like Ran Fan and, by ricochet, with a young clientele.Even though the anti-Fourrure campaigns were in full swing, the major sales rooms decided to call on creators and design students.The goal was to bypass traditional sheaths and specialized rays to make fur a quality fabric like the others, available wherever clothes are sold.

These assiduously cultivated relationships have proven to be paid.The stylists learned to treat the fur in ways that the usual sheaths had never imagined.Thanks to dyeing innovations, it is possible to produce furs in any color likely to be all the rage for a season, from aerial blue to flashy green.The new sewing techniques have also made it possible to manufacture more parts with fewer raw materials.And the fur has become more affordable - a word hitherto rarely associated with pelleterie.

"It starts with a young consumer who buys a fur keychain," explains Julie Maria Iversen, from Kopenhagen Fur.A little later, she may laugh a fur bag.And she will eventually buy a fur coat.The idea is to touch the next generation of women.»»

What to think of this renewal?Should the next generation of women feel "touched"?Or should it be indignant, as animal rights defenders encourage it?Should we congratulate yourself on progress in the skins industry in animal welfare?Or do these measures help "help us better accept the exploitation of animals?""Asks Gary Francione, professor of law at Rutgers University and supporter of stopping any use of animals by humans.

Like livestock and breeding poultry, fur animals spend their lives in captivity, then are killed.With methods that few of us would dare to imagine.For example, fox breeders practice anal electrocution, supposedly faster and ecce.

Many fur animal farms offer decent conditions on a large scale;But many others do not do it or do not want it.However, the sorting process of an auction means that the skins of the same batch can come from 300 different farms - letters or bad.This is a problem for any creator anxious to ensure his customers that he respects decent and lasting methods.

The European fur industry claims that it is working on a solution - a program called Welfur.But its implementation requires beforehand to inspect and note thousands of farms.Steen Henrik Møller, agronomist at the University of Aarhus, participates in the program.I visit with him a Danish vision farm.Its inspection is extremely picky.Møller checks the dimensions of the nest boxes fixed in the cages and controls the quantity of straw necessary for the insulation in winter.He examines each animal, the state of the body, the wounds and the existence of movements back and forth, revealing stress.It introduces a langue to see if the animal responds with fear, aggressiveness or curiosity.A visit to the Welfur lasts about six hours to inspect a sampling of 120 cages according to 22 criteria.

"I hope that no one will be classified in the worst category, risks the breeder. - I hope if, replies Steen Henrik Møller, because, if the system does not know how to sort among the breeders, it will not worknot.»»

However, do buyers really feel concerned?"The answer will be very different in Shanghai or Zurich," admits Tage Pedersen, president of Kopenhagen Fur.But, in the future, consumers will be more and more vigilant.Not only for fur,

But for everything we buy.In a shop, they will ask if the well-being of the animal has been respected.And if the seller is affirmative, they will say: "How do you know?"Pedersen believes that the sector can only afford an inspection system if buyers agree to pay an additional cost for the Welfur label.On this point, he is confident.

The animal protection movement has always wanted to ban the use of fur.Great Britain, Austria and Croatia have taken measures in this sense;The Netherlands work there.But a ban does not prevent people from carrying fur.Production is delocalized where this ban does not apply.During the sale of Kopenhagen Fur, I asked a broker, owner of a vision farm in China, if this country had progressed in terms of animal welfare.The man has tense himself, before launching sharply: "Not much.»»

Prohibiting fur animal breeding does not change the livestock farming either.It is a good consciousness at low cost.The majority of us have never bought fur and never buy it, and yet eat meat, drinks milk, carries leather shoes and participates in forms of animal exploitation that humans have always practiced- on a scale which, in comparison, makes the industry of marginal fur.

The players in the sector like to castigate the ambient hypocrisy.Almost all observe that other breeders did not have to improve their practices as systematically as they are."We knew we were risking the ban," said Tage Pedersen.The other breeders had nothing to fear on that side.»»

So here is my idea: instead of prohibiting the production of furs, let's continue to put pressure to prevent bad breeders from harming.Then, let's take the most progressive breeders and the improvements (generalizable, sometimes as profitable) that they have brought: confinement of agricultural runoff, reduction of stress, best housing for animals, regular inspections to verify their well-being.And let us make this progress become the model of all forms of animal production on which our lives depend, for which we have so many respects.