“3/17/2010, 12:47am EST”
NYT piece on fur industry excludes blood, guts, and torture
This New York Times piece by fashion journalist Eric Wilson explaining fur’s recent resurgence on runways has a gaping hole in it: not one sentence is devoted to considering the lives and terrible plights of the non-human animals who are caged, anally and genitally electrocuted, and most often skinned alive for their fur.
(Mr. Wilson did include the tidbit that some designers “said they felt confident using fur after examining the chain of production and finding it humane,” but you’ll notice that he neither questioned this ridiculous claim nor mentioned the designers’ obvious personal stakes in reciting it.)
I’m glad the paper is interested in publishing how fur companies court and pamper designers behind the scenes to get their stolen skin on runways, but why aren’t they also interested in describing the dirty details of how fur is actually procured? Wouldn’t that be telling the whole story to readers? And isn’t that frankly far more compelling information than how the latest fleeting fashion trend became trendy?
Unfortunately, this pattern of institutional speciesism is very common: mainstream journalists often cover the human drama surrounding animal welfare issues while ignoring those non-human animals whose entire lives are at stake.
They’ll need to be pressured to change for the better, so it’s great to leave comments or email authors when you see this in practice on the internet. If you’re a member of nytimes.com, you can send Mr. Wilson a polite but firmly informed email by going to his news page and clicking on the link entitled “Send an email to Eric Wilson.”
Never leave home without it.
