Kopenhagen Fur, the world's largest fur auction house will be closing its doors in the wake of the mass mink cull in Denmark.
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Kopenhagen Furs, the world’s biggest fur auction house, will be closing its doors by 2023. The Humane Society International (HSI) has declared this as signalling ‘the beginning of the end for the fur trade’.
This news comes after it was announced that millions of mink were to be culled due to an outbreak of a mutated strain of Covid-19 in a fur farm in Denmark. The mutation was deemed potentially detrimental to vaccine development, and a mass culling ensued, leading to mass graves and thousands of mink carcasses scattered across the Danish motorway.
Denmark is the world’s most prolific producer of mink fur, with between 15 and 17 million of the animals housed in more than 1,000 mink farms. This means that the closure of its biggest producer will have a significant knock-on effect not only across Europe but on a global scale.
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The end of fur?
Last week British Vogue called for fashion to ‘disown fur’. While UK law bans fur farms within the country, over the last two years alone the UK has imported over £312,000 worth of fur from Denmark.
However, the closure of Kopenhagen Fur will thankfully reduce the amount of fur imported into the UK, something which has been slowly moving in the right direction.
In a statement sent to Vegan Food and Living, Dr Swabe, Senior Director of Public Affairs for Humane Society International told us: “We have witnessed a significant drop in pelt prices and have seen stockpiles of fur skins going unsold at auctions, sending the fur industry into a global downward spiral.
“We expect an even further decrease in the demand for frivolous fur as COVID-19 affects factory fur farms around the world, forcing governments to shut down operations and farmers to find new avenues of income.”
‘A ticking time bomb’
Although the cull in Denmark was swiftly called off by the Danish prime minister after it had begun due to a lack of legal basis, fur farms remain a ‘ticking time bomb for deadly diseases’. The HSI has firmly declared that “governments must acknowledge that they can no longer justify allowing an industry that both threatens human health and costs tax-payers billions to manage biosecurity risks and provide farmers compensation following culls.”
“It’s time to turn off the life-support machine for this archaic trade and focus instead on supporting farmers to move to humane, safe and economically viable livelihoods. There was never going to be a happy ending for the animals either, stopping breeding them altogether is also the best way to prevent animals suffering for the fickle whims of fashion.”
The impending closure of Kopenhagen Furs is a huge step in the right direction, but there is still a long way to go in the abolishment of fur across the globe.
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