by Mark Waybill

Created on: March 30, 2010

To decide whether the wearing of fur is immoral or not one has to decide just what it is about the fur industry that is 'bad.' Critics like animal rights groups claim it is bad because it kills animals for their fur, often for nothing but their fur. Environmentalists might argue it upsets the fragile ecosystem. Putting aside the commonly held superstitious belief that killing itself is an immoral act, one has to turn to the amount of pain the animal in question feels as it dies. One would imagine they would be killed humanely with bullets or other such devices and would suffer no more than a human would as a firing squad's target.

The environmental argument claims that the ecosystem would be unbalanced by hunting for fur or sport, but this seems not to be the case. The ecosystem is a fit fellow who has many years of life ahead of him, and who adapts very efficiently to change. Change is inevitable, and to preserve an ecosystem merely to protect an endangered animal reeks of sentimentality and nostalgic feeling as felt by a pet owner. Animals and plants become extinct naturally all the time and will continue to do so. There is little truth in the argument that the ecosystem is a fragile elderly cripple.

So unless death is a bad thing, (and even if it were, it happens to all animals eventually, so there would still be no point in fighting it or considering killing immoral, rather merely speeding up the inevitable,) there is no real argument against fur hunting, except perhaps that it, in the cases of hunting for fur alone, is somewhat inefficient and not resourceful. And even if we are to listen to the environmentalist's point of view, allowing fur hunting might encourage mass killing leading to extinction but hunting fur in a controlled fashion would produce little change anyway. As to the wearing of fur, there is even less of a valid argument against that.

If an animal is already dead you can not prevent its death, and you may as well make use of its remains for a worthy purpose. To say that the wearing of fur encourages fur hunting would be a valid argument if fur hunting was a bad thing, but if controlled, it is no worse than hunting or raising livestock for meat. Humans have been eating meat and wearing fur since prehistory. Many beasts eat other creatures for survival, and we also do. We might be the first to use the skins of others, but we certainly were not the first to utilize other creatures for our own needs.

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