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Down and Outre in Beverly Hills

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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.

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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.

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