Opinion: Violence all around in the fur wars

To the editor: It is sad and unfortunate that dozens of freed minks were run over as they escaped the fur farms from which Nicole Kissane and Joseph Buddenberg liberated them.

But it’s beyond bizarre to read in this piece about the “stories of death and loss” suffered by the fur-farmers. Does the author have any conception of the lives and deaths of animals imprisoned, killed, and skinned for fur?

( “Anti-fur activist sentenced,” Jan. 23)

The Idaho mink rancher wrote to the judge of the freed minks, “[t]hey didn’t have a chance.” But of course, that’s precisely what they did have, due only to being released from the fur farm.

Had they not been turned loose, they would have spent their entire lives in captivity deprived of their freedom, and their natural behaviors, to be killed and “liberated” of their fur so that humans could wear it instead — all in the name of fashion and profit.

The animals unliberated from fur farms, of course, are the ones who never had a chance.

Kathie Jenni, Beaumont

The writer is director of Human-Animal Studies at

University of Redlands

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