Genuine Fur is a Green Resource, Faux Fur is a Carcinogenic Pollutant

 

We picked some Styrofoam trash out the river while trapping beav.

   

       Genuine fur is a green, naturally recurring, near infinite, renewable resource from which not only high fashion can be attained, but fur is also a highly effective and utilitarian clothing that excels at keeping relatively weak, soft, and nearly hairless humans warm in conditions that could potentially literally freeze the blood in our veins before we finish dying.  Faux fur is not only derived from petroleum, a finite resource, but its production is caustic, its components are carcinogenic, and when you throw it away it could take up to a thousand years to decompose, during which time it is a toxic microplastic floating around the Earth shortening the lifespan of anything that crosses its path.

 

            Beaver makes a fine specific example, but many points made can be extrapolated to other fur bearers such as lynx, wolf, marten, fox, and coyote.  Breeding pairs of beaver have one litter a year of up to four kits.  At around two years of age the kits are expelled from the family lodge to make their own way in their watery world.  If conditions on the river or lake allow, meaning food is plentiful they may be allowed to make their own lodge just around the river bend.  But if food is scarce, either due to the country being of poor deciduous foliage or over grazing by the local beaver population, their parents will violently drive them further, as will any other established family group.  Such conflicts between juvenile wanderers and established adults can be brutal, with likely no injury to the adult and the juvenile sustaining bites, sometimes severe and terribly scarring, to their rump as they flee the adult’s territory.  It’s when two mature adults clash over territory and therefore food that the real blood shed occurs.

            I trapped a stretch of river that was thick with beaver, no one had trapped it in some time as the dollar value of beaver fur had plummeted.  I trap them for my own sewing which can increase the monetary worth of a beaver skin.  I was likely the first trapper on that stretch in several generations of beaver.  It was crowded with lodges!  And their unfamiliarity with traps made them easy to catch.  The real work with beaver is when the skinning knife comes out.  Some fur animals can be peeled like a sock once the opening cuts are made, but with mature beaver and some other fur bearers that is not the case.  Every inch of skin must be cut from the body, generally in one of two methods.  Clean skinning is where all the flesh and fat is left on the carcass, a sharp knife slicing the skin cleanly from the meat.  This is tedious and time consuming.  The other method is “rough skinning” then laboriously scraping the remaining flesh from the hide, termed “fleshing.”  I clean skin mature beaver, but the flesh of the kits has not terribly adhered to the skin so I rough skin them and drape the hide fur down over a fleshing beam and push the meat off the skin with a dull curved knife with a handle at each end, aptly dubbed a “fleshing knife.”  

Dotter claiming some fur

Oldest hooping a beav

 

 

 

 

 

It was in the skinning process that I found evidence that this particular area may have been over populated and as a result perhaps teetering on the brink of a population crash.  The juveniles had small lacerations, some of them puss filled, on their rumps where they were “encouraged” to move along by adults.  But many of the adult beaver had multiple severe and infected lacerations about their neck and shoulders, as well as on their rumps.  Extensive healed scarring showed a long history of same.  The best I can figure is the mature beavers were in terrible physical conflict with each other, and often, likely over food resources.  Given the nature of the injuries, and the tools with which beaver are uniquely equipped for their logging activities, I suspect two mature beaver would stand and grapple with their front paws in an attempt to position their opponent for optimal biting while trying to avoid injury of their own.  This resulted in gruesome injuries around their shoulders and neck and from what I found on all the beaver I trapped that season, not one avoided injury.  One would inevitably lose the battle and turn to flee, in so doing sustain injuries on their posterior as the vanquisher punctuates their victory with a few more bites in pursuit of the vanquished.  I returned to that river several seasons and saw the population become less dense.  But beaver remain in the area, continuing to reproduce more fur every year.  It is likely that their population has even increased, and I’m due to trap there again on the rivers through which I cycle. 

Beaver soup

Dutch Oven Beav

 

After I’ve trapped, skinned, stretched and dried the beaver hides I ship them to a tannery.  There it is placed in a “pickling” solution that consists of mild chemicals such as salt, water, alum, soda, and vinegar.  Once adequately pickled it is neutralized, and it is dried again.  At this stage it is stiff and more appropriately used as a bludgeon than clothing.  Natural oils such as vegetable and lanolin are applied to the skin side, and it is placed in a large horizontal drum with sawdust for the “drumming process” where the drum revolves for a time, lifting and dropping the hides in the sawdust, resulting in a softened skin while the saw dust removes any excess oil and grease remaining on the hide.  The medium is changed as it gets saturated, and the hides are drummed in less and less media until there is no dust remaining and the rising and falling against the side of the drum as it rotates and colliding with other hides has resulted in a soft and supple leather, and clean shiny fur.  It is then returned to me, where I craft it into warm hats, mittens, and head bands.  The pieces too small for these crafts are turned into zipper pulls and various other chachcies. If properly cared for, this fur will last a lifetime, and well into that of the inheritor.  If properly managed, the beaver population will remain on the landscape indefinitely.  I skim the excess in my own pursuit of fur and its sales, but I do so with the sustainability of their population in mind.  If I keep the peaks of their population lower, perhaps they will not overgraze their food source resulting in a population crash where they would die off en masse from starvation.  Such a population crash would take human generations to recover.  This has been demonstrated historically in the Contiguous Western US when the beaver population was decimated due to unregulated harvest for the felt hat trade.  If I do it right, the beaver populations I and my progeny trap will remain in perpetuity, for my children and their children and so on to trap, eat, wear, and sell, forever.        

Dotter with the dress we made, gloves we trimmed

Dotter with her fur hat and her fish

Middle child with his fur hat, rough, pike fishing

 

            There is no avoiding the fact that for me to harvest a fur, an animal must die.  But the death of that animal is as unavoidable as my own, though I hope to die many, many years from now of a massive coronary carrying a moose leg to the boat.  I imagine wearing a bracelet not unlike a “Do Not Resuscitate” bracelet, though mine will display my next of kin and their contact information, as well as instructions to throw me on top of the meat and take me home.  I guess most people imagine dying peacefully in bed deep into their geriatrics.  For the beaver, there is no chance of such a peaceful death.  They die naturally in many ways, none of which could be described as peaceful.  They starve to death in their dens in the winter, if they were unable to cache enough food before freeze up.  They freeze to death if their lodge can’t keep them warm.  Many are eaten by predators, torn violently apart and consumption begins sometimes before they are even completely dead.  Their death is naturally unavoidable, and if I kill them it is likely to be much more efficient and humane than to be captured by a wolf and eaten alive.       

Middle with his beaver vest

            Faux fur is synthesized from petroleum, a finite resource, and limestone.  The madocrlyic polymers used in the production of these pile fabrics (from here I will desist in referring to them as fur, they are not) has been found to be a multi-site carcinogen in mice in a recent study.  These plastic mixtures are literally compressed, burned, and spun, and pressed through a device resembling a showerhead that forms them into fibers, from which they’re dropped into a water bath and then dried, removing the acetone used to thin the mixture for extrusion, then woven into a synthetic base that mimics the skin, from which the individual cancer hairs stick as if they were fur.  Even further treatments are done after this to make it more fur like, but it remains a flimsy carcinogenic forever plastic counterfeit that is not as durable as fur, quickly becoming visually unappealing and subsequently is thrown away to rot for a thousand years in a landfill, yet another source of toxic microplastics.

            It would be terribly easy to hyperbolize further on the negative effects of microforeverplastics on the earth.  They are found in the ocean, in fresh water, in the air, all around the globe, and even in human blood and tissue samples.  But there has only recently been any substantial research on the effects of microplastics on humans, and mostly on model species, despite the fact that we have been using plastics for generations.  Tupperware, mixing bowls, cereal bowls, cereal bags in the boxes, drinking cups, liquor bottles, this keyboard upon which I’m furiously typing.  The seat upon which you rest as you read this.  These products contain phthalates, a chemical that affects elasticity in plastic used in such items as water bottles, toys, cosmetics, and even perhaps the synthetics used in manufacturing pile fabrics.  Phthalates have been found to have profound negative effects on humans.  Exposure, from gestation to adolescence, results in increased inflammation, reduced endocrine functionality, increased immune deficiencies, decreased bone density in male children, hypogonadism and testicular dysgenesis in males as well as deficient sperm, premature puberty in females, increased likelihood of endometriosis, complications in pregnancy, and increases in polycystic ovarian syndrome. 

            Fur has none of these consequences.  With modern processing, tanning is none toxic, and the finished product, once it is no longer cared for, is quickly biodegradable.  This means that it will soon be harmless, and maybe even useful, dirt.  Further, use of this renewable resource is natural.  Consider the human body.  It is relatively soft, our skin is thin, we have sparse hair that has not had any insulative worth since before Cro-Magnon Man.  So, we wear fur, and have for more than a hundred millennia.  With our bicuspids we also eat the meat of what we wear!  Beaver is a fine, fine meal, as well as lynx, and both make excellent bait for fur bearing carnivores as everything likes to eat beaver and lynx.  As humans we are part of nature, the one animal on the planet that alters their environment to suit their purpose more than beaver we wear.  

             With recent and ongoing studies, it is becoming more and more clear how dangerous to our health and ecosystem that plastic trash is becoming.  Plastic is ubiquitous, and somehow despite the environmental impacts of extracting petroleum, it’s cheap.  But it is not something that we should be using aesthetically as it’s being used as ruffs on bargain bin parkas.  And it certainly shouldn’t be used on genuine cold weather gear like Canada Goose parkas, who recently in a cowardly move caved to social pressure and decided to use only recycled coyote for their ruffs.  In so doing they stopped supporting trappers, many of whom used to wear their product.  Disney, in their epic movie Togo about the “real serum run hero,” used only pile fabric in production of the movie.  This movie is about Native Alaskans and Sourdough whites that hunted and trapped using their dog teams, and wore fur and ate what they caught.  To defile their memory with carcinogenic trash is a travesty.    

Two lynx on the last day!

One of their earliest catches, snowshoe hare

 

         

 

 

    Fur is green.  Fur is renewable.  If harvested conscientiously, and if we don’t develop all the wild land, the source of fur will exist in perpetuity.  The creation of fur carries no carcinogenic risk, wearing it does not expose you to microplastic carcinogenic trash, and disposing of it bears no toxic load to the environment.  There is no reason to not wear fur, except for the incorrect social exhortations that fur is not a green product.