Down and Outre in Beverly Hills

Nothing spells money like m-i-n-k.

Even in Beverly Hills, where tennis courts and swimming pools say sunny Southern Cal, moneyed traditionalists still pass a furrier’s shop with a glance of desire. What could break the charm? Something you’d like to see in very small print, if at all. That would be a tag, promoted by animal rights activists, saying precisely how some lovely animals became a coat. This could ruin a bistro lunch. And has.

On Tuesday the Beverly Hills City Council ordered a special election for May 11 on a municipal initiative to require that each fur garment for sale bear this advisory: “This product is made with fur from animals that may have been killed by electrocution, gassing, neck breaking, poison, clubbing, stomping or drowning and may have been trapped in steel-jaw leg-hold traps.”

Beverly Hills Consumers for Informed Choices collected the required signatures to get the measure on the ballot and was helped by a videotape, made surreptitiously, of fur salesmen telling a supposed customer that the animals are put down by lethal injection, just like your aged pet dog or cat. Far from the whole truth? You bet.

But where does this contretemps end? And is this what the taxpayer-funded initiative process was meant for? Buying a fur--or leather shoes or a package of chicken wings--is a matter of personal choice. Let’s not start putting it to a vote.