The fashionable look in the fur industry this fall will be bared teeth and sharpened claws, with tails definitely not tucked between the legs.
From Michigan Avenue retailers to Louisiana bayou trappers, the American fur industry has had all it can stand from the animal rights ”Anti`s” and their ”fur burn-in” demonstrations and ”Rock Against Fur” concerts. Come fall, they are going hunting for bear.
”You let yourself get kicked enough times and pretty soon you can`t fight back,” said Chicago furrier Arthur L. Himmel, president of the local chapter of Associated Fur Industries, which has joined forces with the Fur Information Council and the Fur Farm Animal Welfare Coalition to battle the Anti`s.
Fur sellers, designers, hunters, trappers and ranchers are preparing to fight back for the first time, in a unified million-dollar multimedia counterattack this fall, employing the hired big guns of one of the world`s largest public relations firms, Burson-Marsteller of New York.
”We will be speaking with one voice to combat the lies and the exaggerations that have been prevalent in the press from people determined to put us out of business,” said Elliot Lippin, national president of the American Fur Industry.
Fur industry folks promised that it will be an ”aggressive” response to the industry`s increasingly hostile-and effective-foes, who have enlisted antifur endorsements from the likes of First Lady Barbara Bush, who shunned a free fur in favor of a cloth coat for the inauguration, as well as Princess Diana, and the regal Brooke Shields, among others.
The enemy may have lined up some of the rich and famous, but the fur industry has history behind it, Lippin said.
”It is obviously the oldest industry in the history of humankind,” said the furrier. The fur industry played an essential role in the development of the United States and the North American continent.”
The fur industry`s counterattack is still in the planning stages, but preliminary pelting is already underway. Industry spokesmen are touting their product as a ”renewable resource” while attacking the tax-exempt status of animal rights groups, which they charge are often hugely profitable enterprises masquerading as selfless crusades.
”I don`t think that people who give to animal rights groups realize what their money goes for,” said Tom Riley, vice president of the Fur Information Council. The animal rights group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals
”flew six lobsters from a Baltimore restaurant to Maine so that they could be dumped back into the ocean. I wonder if people knew their money was going to pay for a lobster`s airfare.”
The fur industry defenders also have honed their rebuttal to animal rights activists who suggest that fake fur is more benevolent than the real stuff. The furriers claim that more lasting environmental damage is caused by the manufacturing of the fakes, which are fashioned from petroleum byproducts, than by the trapping, hunting or raising of animal fur.
”All fake furs are from oil by-products, and look at the mess Exxon caused in Alaska,” said Robert Keim of Keim Furs in Chicago. ”Fake furs are anti-environment.”
The for-fur crowd already is showing signs of the same overzealousness that they have charged their Anti`s with. Fur industry advocates have gone so far as to borrow from the slogans of the pro-abortion forces, crying that people should have ”freedom of choice” and control over their own body temperatures.
Mink stole the show
By this fall, the all-out anti-Anti campaign should be fully-loaded, and word from the enemy camp of animal rights activists last week was ”give us your best shot.”
”I think we are getting to them,” said Carol L. Burnett, director of communications for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), which is based in Washington that claims more than 250,000 members.
”The fact that they have formed this council and that they are planning an advertising campaign is certainly a sign that they are worried,” she said. Burnett was a bit concerned herself last week after being indicted by a federal grand jury in Baltimore in what government officials call a move to curb increasingly aggressive activities by the animal rights groups. She and PETA cofounder Alexander F. Pacheco, 30, were charged with felony assault of a federal police officer during an April 24 demonstration against the use of animals in medical research at the National Institute of Health in Baltimore. If convicted, the two animal rights activists face three years in prison and fines up to $250,000 each.
PETA (pronounced ”peeta”) staged another demonstration last week outside the annual meeting of the beleaguered Chicago fur company, Evans Inc., the country`s largest retail fur chain.
Led by the cult movie actress whose professional name is Mink Stole, the demonstrators carried signs designed to portray fur clothing as an accessory to murder: ”Buy a fur and slip into something dead,” read one.
A truly humane group probably would not have targeted such a struggling concern as Evans Inc., which reported a loss of $3.8 million in the last fiscal year on sales of $148 million.
The Anti`s rubbed it in outside Evans` board meeting last week by proclaiming their demonstration a ”victory party” and exhorting the company`s stockholders to ”sell while you can and get the blood off your hands.”
The group`s spokeswoman, whose real name is Nancy Stole, has appeared primarily in films directed by John Waters, including, of course,
”Polyester.” She offered her services to PETA a year ago because of her long-term personal belief in animal rights and because she thought her stage name made her an unnatural for the job, she said. ”It`s ironic, sort of like being an antinuclear activist with a name like `Three Mile Island.` ”
”The fur industry is cruelty catering to vanity,” said Stole, kicking into her standard antifur speech. ”We have reached the age where we no longer have to kill to feed and clothe ourselves. There is no justification for fur besides vanity.
”Eventually we would like to have public opinion outlaw fur so that it is no longer considered glamorous and would be looked at as stupid, shallow, vain and conceited,” the actress said.
Stung by mild winters
Though Mink Stole claims her group`s efforts have hurt the industry, market analysts are more inclined to cite mild winters and lower pelt prices for a two-year leveling off in profits. Previously sales had climbed from $612 million in 1977 to $1.8 million in 1987, thanks in large part to the emergence of the working woman.
”For years the average customer was a man buying a fur coat for a wife in her mid-50s to 60s,” Tom Riley explained. ”That was the average market. Then, about six to eight years ago, the market took a dramatic swing as the professonal woman gained stature and income. It completely shifted so that now the average fur-buyer is a woman in her late 20s and 30s, and she usually has more than one fur coat.”
Fur industry analysts said the dramatic swing in the market tempted many fur suppliers and fur retailers to overstock. Those that overestimated the market have been sorely hurt over the last two years as the fur market flattened out.
Rampaging raccoons?
The Anti`s have added assault to ennui in the fur market with their persistent, ingenious and sometimes terrorist tactics. In the initial days of the Anti`s assault, they focused mostly on the rural trappers, whose steel-clawed traps made for violent and graphic antifur propaganda. At the urging of the animal rights groups, several states passed antitrapping laws or greatly restricted the hunting and trapping of furry varmints.
”I am very defensive about trapping because we have been slapped and kicked for so many years,” said Mike Mohr of Springfield, who serves on the board of the Illinois Trappers Association.
Illinois is among the top 10 fur-producing states in the country and the state`s annual harvest of beaver, fox, coyote, raccoon and other fur-bearers has been worth about $7 million in recent years. By the time that product reaches the retail stores, its value is closer to $40 million. There are about 12,000 full- and part-time trappers in Illinois and 45,000 fur hunters.
Mohr said that once the Anti`s began to target the big-money end of the fur industry-the retailers-it forced the fur industry to pull together, examine itself and plan a counterattack. Education of the city dwellers is one key element in the fur industry`s campaign, Mohr said. Few urban residents are aware of the conservation value in trapping and hunting the fur-bearers, he said.
An uncontrolled beaver population would greatly endanger farmlands, waterways and roads, for example, he said, and raccoons, which are prone to rabies, can overrun a region if their numbers are unchecked.
Trappers and hunters fit into the ecosystem, too, Mohr maintained, and they make good use of what they bag, for clothing and food. City people just don`t understand the hunting and trapping tradition, he said. ”They think everything comes from Eisner or the Jewel Food Store and they don`t really care beyond that,” Mohr opined.
When the fur market shot up several years ago, hundreds of trappers and hunters switched tactics and became fur ranchers; now about 80 percent of furs sold in the U.S. are from ranch-raised mink and fox. The Fur Farm Animal Welfare Coalition, an industry watchdog group, hopes to install a mandatory certification program for fur ranches, which also have been the focus of attacks by animal rights groups that claim their methods can be cruel to the critters.
Not long after the disparate elements of the fur industry united in its efforts to combat the Anti`s, the decision was made to seek professional help. ”We decided we were not knowledgeable enough in this sort of thing so we found Burson-Marsteller, which did a good job with the Tylenol group when they had all their trouble,” said Himmel, whose 141-year-old family business is based in the Beverly neighborhood on the Far South Side.
The public relations firm is referring all inquiries back to their client, in something of a twist on the usual ”talk to our p.r. agent” theme, until their strategy is in place, a spokesperson said. Taking on the forces of the myriad animal rights groups will be no easy pickings.
The Anti`s have employed methods ranging from dropping notecards with nasty messages into the pockets of furs on display in retail stores, to the defacing and vandalizing of stores and their merchandise, and even issuing texts on how to bomb the enemy, Riley said.
PETA has been at the forefront of the combat, while serving as a catalyst and media outlet for other Anti groups as well, he said. ”I would consider PETA one of the more extreme groups,” said Riley, adding that several fur stores in Colorado Springs, Colo., were recently spray-painted with antifur slogans and the PETA logo.
Other animal rights groups, notably the Animal Liberation Front, have been categorized as genuine terrorists by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Riley noted. A more moderate group, Mobilization for Animals, based in New York, bought ads on city buses that displayed a photograph of two cuddly raccoons peeking from a rock pile with the caption ”These babies are looking for their mother. Is she on your back?”
The Fur Information Council, which monitors the activities of about 200 animal rights groups, reports increasingly violent tactics, including anti-Semitic graffiti-aimed at Jewish furriers-that equates what the industry calls ”fur harvesting” with the Holocaust.
Snaring celebs
The antifur front has been especially successful in enlisting high profile celebrities in their cause, to urge the fur-fancying public to take the wraps off. Early this year, PETA sponsored a ”Rock Against Fur”
fundraiser at the Palladium dance club in Manhattan that drew about 3,500 at up to $20 a ticket.
Celebs on hand to speak out against the fur trade included Jane Wiedlin, former member of the Go-Go rock band, who sang her animal rights anthem
”Fur” from her album of the same name. Her chorus included members of the B-52s rock band and actor River Phoenix and his girlfriend, actress Martha Plimpton. People magazine covered the event and noted that Phoenix and Plimpton are so pure of heart on the animal rights front that neither even eats honey.
Closer to the hearts and financial well-being of the fur industry, designer Bill Blass declared late last year that he no longer would incorporate fur in his fashions as a result of his personal beliefs regarding animal rights.
Whether the industry`s professional public relations counterattack will stave off the enemy in natural fibers awaits to be seen. Some furriers believe that what they really could use is not a heated battle with the Anti`s but a few million cold shoulders come December.
”We just need a good, cold winter,” Himmel said.
