In touch with our past

I DON'T know what Eve wore for modesty and warmth or what Adam put on for flash and protection, but I can tell you that it wasn't a fig leaf. Our most distant ancestors came through the Ice Age without their bits going black with frostbite because they wore second-hand skin. Fur.

We are nud_e underneath our pyjamas. Naked apes. We don't have enough hair, fur, fluff or feathers to deflect even the finest drizzle. We shiver in pathetically bald bodies for a reason, and the reason is that we look better in suede than cows do.

We shed our hair because it was our natural selection, our destiny, and instead gained those uniquely human attributes: taste and vanity. We wore other species' skins when they had no further use for them, and we've been doing it for a long time.

Fur was practical and chic, stylish and sensible for 100,000 years, and then all of a sudden became the cagoule of shame in the past decade, in one of the oddest about-faces in all civilisation.

The fatwa on fur has become automatic and universal in our select and ethically compromised bit of the First World. The virulence and viciousness of fur vigilantes mean that few of us now bother to brave the spittle-flecked venom of those nylon Taliban from self-righteous pressure groups and dim, new-age absolutists.

Enough. A number of furriers are now taking back the morality of skin. They are mostly from the north - Scandinavia, Greenland, Russia and Iceland - where fur has always been a practical business in a most practical part of the world.

In Denmark, fur is an agricultural business. That famously cruel and authoritarian society farms more mink than any other country, and it does so in conditions that most Danish pigs could only dream of.

A remarkable furrier in Reykjavik, Eggert Johannsson, is a missionary for what he calls ethical fur: well sourced, responsibly farmed and humanely culled.

Seals, for instance. The European Union is debating whether to ban sealskin on anyone except a seal. In Greenland, hunting them is the subsistence income of the east coast. It's what they've always done. There is nothing else to do. They can't grow cut flowers instead.

In Iceland, parts of the shore where the seals congregate were sold as agricultural assets. Farmers would facilitate the natural seal colonies, protecting them from predators, and once a year they'd cull them. But since the seal market has collapsed, so have the care and value of the shoreline, and so have the seals.

All over the northern reaches, their populations are fluctuating. They're caught in fishing nets, shot by fishermen. They hang around ports and fish farms like water foxes. The seals have gone from being valuable, protected and plentiful, to being waterborne vermin and endangered, because we have removed their value thanks to squeamishness.

The argument goes that once we may have needed fur, but now we don't; we have, instead, technology. Well, leaving aside the aesthetics of real, I assume you all know how polymers such as nylon and polyester are made. That they use fossil fuels and intensely polluting processes that involve some of the most toxic chemicals on the planet.

I've seen the greatest environmental disaster on the globe: the death of the Aral Sea in Central Asia as the Oxus River has dried up, reducing an area the size of Denmark to a toxic, salted dust bowl, and all because of cotton. Cotton is an ecological nightmare. Cotton has to be grown as a mono-crop, so you can't have cotton in your backyard or sell it in the farmers market. It's as thirsty as a sailor on shore leave, as susceptible to infestations and diseases as a Haitian hooker.

The most poignant argument for fur is not where it comes from or who first wore it; it's what it looks like and how it feels. A polyamide coat connects you to an oil well and a factory; fur joins you to your heritage. It is 100,000 years of history and culture. We wear fur because it is our story.

If you haven't put on a fur coat recently, or ever, try it. Cast aside your prejudice and feel it. You can sense it's not simply a statement of fashion, wealth or even warmth; the connection is ancient.

Fur is the cover, the binding, of our long story. And if you're still not convinced, consider your pillows. The feathers inside, the bird fur, where do you imagine that came from? How do you imagine all that duck and goose skin was gathered? Sleep well.

The Times

Link

So, sales are down then?

It is odd that so many women shun fur on the basis of ethics but quite happily wear leather boots, snake skin belts and carry crocodile handbags.

But then snakes aren't cuddly are they?

Well apart from my pet one eyed bed specimen.

Mink only look cuddly, I wouldn't recommend trying to cuddle one.

And as for foxes....

As QEII, the monarch not the ship, said to prince Charles when he told her he was going to Middlesbrough.

"Where the fox 'at?"

So he did.

The only fur garment I ever had was my old Afghan coat back in my hippy days. Strewth did that ever stink if it got wet.

I pity the poor Afghani who lost his skin. Did it have any tattoos?

Personally, I know a lot of people who like beaver.

I think many of them (beaver) are protected aren't they? Probably the same reason that one doesn't see a lot of pussy fur these days...

Agreed, I don't seem to see anywhere near as much as I used to.

Probably got something to do with growing old...

I use foam pillows, but I take your point. Personally, I'm not against the use of animal products and I don't think we can do without them- but it seems to me that when we can do without them, we should try- as good manners, if nothing else.

I'm not sure I want to know how foam pillows fall into the same category as pussy hair.

- sorry was replying to a much earlier post regarding feather pillows

Do you realise how many foams had to die just so that you could have a comfortable pillow?

Hey, back in the 70s I was a heartless slayer of naugas (for the naugahide, natch!)