[Puffer Fish]

First, I say this with a lot of irony, because Northern Europe is the place where wearing a mink coat would be the most politically incorrect. Super progressive place with the busy-body governments passing all sorts of laws to protect animals.


Denmark to cull 15 million Minks

The Danish government said that a majority in parliament backed its decision to cull the country's 15 million minks over concerns about a mutated version of the virus that has spread among the animals

The government had announced the cull despite not having the right to order the killing of healthy animals, an embarrassing misstep that caused it to scramble to build political consensus for a new law.

The one-party Social Democratic, minority government made a deal late Monday with four left-leaning and center parties to support a law proposal that would allow for the culling of all mink, including those outside northern Denmark where infections have been found. The law proposal also bans mink farming until the end of 2021.

"There is now an agreement that will take care of that," Mogens Jensen, the agriculture minister, told parliament. "I would like to apologize to the Danish mink breeders that it was not made clear that there was no legal basis."

It was unclear when a parliamentary vote would take place.

The mutated version of the coronavirus found among the mink can be transmitted to people, though there is no evidence so far that it is more dangerous or resistant to vaccines. Earlier this month, authorities said that 11 people were sickened by it.
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Danish government gets backing for plan to cull minks | St. Louis business news | stltoday.com
https://www.stltoday.com/business/danis ... fe6d2.html

Sounds like a little bit of paranoia here.
But all those slaughtered minks should allow for the availability of many fur hides to make expensive luxury coats.


The country of Norway, for instance, introduced a law to ban fur farming in 2018 that will fully phase into effect and completely ban existing fur farms entirely by 2025.
Denmark in 2007 passed a law to improve the welfare of fur-bearing animals on fur farms, and in 2009 passed a law to ban fox farming, with will not fully phase into effect until 2023.
Sweden passed an Animal Protection Ordinance in 1995 that prohibited caging foxes, requires those animals to have the opportunity to be active, to dig, and to socialize with other foxes. As a result of the ordinance, combined with the much higher cost of labor in Sweden, fox farming no longer became economically viable, and the fur farms soon all shut down.
Germany passed stricter animal welfare regulations in 2017, which made raising minks financially nonviable to farmers. As a result of those regulations and pressure from the public, the country's last fur farmer got out of the business in 2019.
The UK banned fur farming in 2000, also including Scotland and Northern Ireland in 2002. As of 2020, the UK is considering banning the sale of furs.

(source for information: PETA site https://www.peta.org/features/fur-bans-fur-free-future/ )


So which is it? Protect the animals, or senselessly slaughter them en masse ?

This coronavirus pandemic has revealed a lot of absurd ironies, and forced progressives to choose between their different values and decide which are the most important.