Eastern Europe is back in the dog & cat fur trade, from ANIMAL PEOPLE, January/February 2006

[Guest guest]

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, January/February 2006:

 

Eastern Europe is back in the dog & cat fur trade

 

BRUSSELS, BUDAPEST, SOFIA--Dog and cat fur of eastern

European origin appears to be back on the market, almost a decade

after the post-Communist rise of animal advocacy put an official end

to the centuries-old budka system of funding animal control by

selling pelts.

" The long battle to keep cat and dog fur out of Europe has

focused on trying to ban the import of pelts from China-until now, "

Humane Society International said, inviting media to a December 8,

2005 press conference at the European Parliament headquarters in

Brussels.

Featuring HIS investigator Richard Swain and Heather Mills

McCartney, wife of composer Sir Paul McCartney, the press

conference was called to support a bill against importing dog and cat

fur introduced by European Parliament members Struan Stevenson,

Phillip Whitehead, and Paulo Casaca.

" In December 2003, Stevenson won the backing of the majority

of the European Parliament for a ban. Three hundred and forty six

members supported the declaration, which subsequently became a

formal resolution of the European Parliament to the Commission and

the Council of Ministers, " recounted Stevenson's parliamentary

secretary, Luisa Strani. " It was only the 6th time in history that

the Parliament has obtained a majority of signatures on a

Declaration, " Strani said, but the requested legislation is still

not in effect.

The Brussels press conference was the first of a two-part

televised hit at the Chinese dog and cat fur trade. The second part

was an hour-long Larry King Live broadcast on December 11, 2005

featuring Swain, Mills McCartney, actor Alec Baldwin, and

Representatives Jim Moran (D-Virginia) and Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio)

as an expert panel commenting on video of dogs and cats being killed

and roughly handled.

In Brussels, however, Swain showed an undercover video

indicating that dog and cat fur may also be entering the EU from the

Czech Republic. The video showed a worker in a Czech warehouse

telling investigators that most of the cat and dog skins hanging on

nearby rails were from local sources. Only a few, the worker said,

were from China.

" Domestic cats are stolen off the streets [for fur], and

we're talking about 2,000 to 3,000 just in the Czech Republic, not

in the whole of Europe, " Mills McCartney alleged.

A second expose of dog and cat fur originating from eastern

Europe aired a few days later in Germany.

" An undercover investigation has revealed a booming trade in

dog fur coats from eastern Europe, some of which are likely to be on

sale in Britain, " summarized Katy Duke and Elizabeth Day of the

London Telegraph.

" The fur, which comes from both strays and captured pets, is

often re-labelled to disguise its origins before being stitched into

coats and re-dyed, " Duke and Day continued. The investigation

focused on Bulgaria. "

" There is a massive industry based on the systematic killing

of dogs, " Bulgarian SPCA president Yordanka Zrcheva told the

cameras. " There are dog fur factories all over Bulgaria, and they

pro duce all sorts of items, like fur coats, leather shoes and bags

made from dogs, and so on. "

" Around 10,000 dogs are collected and killed in Sofia alone

every year, often shipped straight to fur factories from the dog

pounds, " Doctors for Animals spokesperson Rumi Becker said. " The

so-called fur lords who run the factories are farming the dogs on the

street. They don't have to feed or house them or do anything except

round them up and then skin them. I bought a black and white coat

labelled Korean wolf, " Becker claimed, displaying the garment. " I

asked if it was made with street dog fur, and the vendor said it

was, but that I should keep my voice down. I was pretending to be a

dealer, and asked if it would be possible to have more. She told me

she had 750 in a storeroom. "

Commented Sofia animal advocate Alina Lilova, " This is not the first

report of its kind. Until recently, most of the allegations I'd

heard didn't seem to be backed up by serious investigation, and I

hoped they would be false. But these look credible. "

Lilova was aware of some dealing in dog and cat fur, but not

on a commercial scale. " Earlier in 2005, " Lilova recalled, " the

media in Ruse, a city by the Danube, reported that the local

German-Bulgarian animal protection society confiscated the dogs of a

man accused by his neighbors of systematically killing his own dogs

and selling their coats, based on actual sightings of gruesome

things going on in his yard. "

The solution to the problem, Lilova pointed out, will be to

sterilize enough dogs and cats so that eastern Europe no longer has a

surplus. " The Sofia humane organizations have miraculously achieved

a small victory with the new mayor and are allowed to invite

international teams to help sterilize outdoor dogs, " Lilova added.

" They also received an encouraging letter from the national

veterinary service. The problem is that it is not clear who could be

invited. We would need several clinics to cover the entire city in a

relatively short period of time. "

Lilova said she was studying the ANIMAL PEOPLE online how-to

materials on fundraising in hopes of becoming better able to help.

Vier Pfoten, an Aust-rian group already sterilizing dogs in Sofia

and many other parts of eastern Europe, issued yet another expose of

the eastern European dog and cat fur traffic on December 22. " In

Hungary we identified the fur trim on a winter coat as raccoon dog, "

also known as tanuki, " e-mailed Helmut Dengler of Vier Pfoten. " The

coat was bought in a Budapest discount shop in Budapest. The fur was

tested by a method based on analysis and comparison of the protein

structure. "

As tanuki are raised for fur and meat in China and Korea,

that coat was probably of Asian origin. But Vier Pfoten also found

dog fur coats of less evident origin sold by a German online vendor.

" PETA Germany identified dog fur trim on a coat at the fashion store

Peek & Cloppenburg in Munich, " Dengler added. " The Dutch animal

protection organisation Bont voor Dieren has also found evidence of

cat and dog fur trim. "

 

The budkas

 

European demand for dog and cat pelts fell off to nil in the

early post-Communist years, coinciding with a global fur sales

slump. Often listed among the low-bid lots at international fur

auctions, dog and cat fur vanished from the sales reports by the

mid-1990s.

As the budkas were no longer profitable, replacing them with

western-style animal control agencies became politically popular. For

about five years, beginning after French actress-turned-activist

Brigitte Bardot began campaigning on behalf of Romanian dogs in 1996,

western European donors poured tens of millions of euros into efforts

to take eastern Europe directly from the budkas to no-kill animal

control, whether or not the necessary high-volume dog and cat

sterilization programs were up and running, and regardless of whether

the public was adequately educated about the need to sterilize,

vaccinate, and keep pets from roaming.

Many budkas were replaced by quasi-no-kill canine

concentration camps, where dogs die of starvation, disease,

exposure, and untreated wounds suffered in fighting to stay alive.

Operated both by local governments and by nonprofit organizations,

so-called " no-kill shelters " scattered through the former Communist

nations continue to hold dogs and cats in crowded, often filthy

conditions, with little chance of adoption.

Most of the money sent to help impounded animals during the

1996-2001 time frame appears to have been siphoned off through

corruption. The most flagrant offender, Wolfgang Ullrich, in April

2003 drew a 12-year prison sentence in Germany for embezzling as much

as $45 million from funds donated in Germany, Austria, and

Switzerland to assist shelters in Romania.

There were some successes in dismantling the budkas. The

budka in Kiev, Ukraine, clubbed and skinned as many as

40,000-50,000 animals per year until former United Nations journalist

Tamara Tarnawska exposed the brutality in 1996. A new mayor in March

1997 turned the budka site over to SOS Animals Ukraine, a charity

Tarnawska formed to promote pet sterilization and adoption.

A new agency created to take over animal control, called

Animals In The City, allegedly continued many of the budka abuses,

including legal harassment and alleged violent intimidation of

critics. But officially, Kiev has stayed out of the dog and cat fur

industry.

Galati, Romania, got out of the fur trade at about the same

time by ceasing to operate the city pound as a budka, and by

converting a defunct fox farm once staffed by jail inmates into a

pound to help hold the resultant overflow of dogs. Both facilities

are now assisted by groups whose work parallels that of the nonprofit

shelter auxiliaries common in the U.S.: Help Labus at the former fox

farm, ROLDA at the former budka, the latter aided by the U.S. group

Romania Animal Rescue.

In eastern Europe, as in the U.S., where humane society

involvement in pounds was long partly motivated by trying to prevent

the sale of animals to laboratories, an institutional humane

presence tends to reduce pound abuses. However, the

economic trends that favored budka closure and humane involvement

also favored privatization. Initially, that was not a big problem.

With no profit left in pelts, bidders on animal control contracts

tended to be either non-profit humane societies, or in a few cases,

for-profit companies with western European pet store adoption

connections. (Despite many rumors, no traffic in eastern European

dogs to western European laboratories has ever been confirmed.)

A resurgent dog-and-cat fur market driven by Chinese exports

appears to have changed the economics. Some municipal agencies may

have quietly returned to the budka approach. Corrupt animal control

employees are suspected in several cities of selling dog and cat

pelts without official permission, and pocketing the proceeds--

although the administrators may be looking the other way, to avoid

having to pay higher salaries to attract a better class of worker.

Pelt brokers may also be seeking animal control contracts in

places where dog and cat intakes are still high, with little done to

promote sterilization and pet identification.

Cutting off the import of any dog or cat fur into the

European Union would be one quick way to curtail any revival of the

budka system, as this would end access to the most lucrative part of

the market.

National bans on importing dog and cat fur are already in

place in Australia, Belgium, Denmark, France, Greece, Italy,

Switzerland, and the U.S., but enforcement has been questionable,

since most dog and cat fur items are too small and inexpensive to

attract customs inspectors' attention.

 

--Merritt Clifton

Editor, ANIMAL PEOPLE

P.O. Box 960

Clinton, WA 98236

Web: www.animalpeoplenews.org