Ask the fur farmer

[vison]

OK. I shall attempt to spread knowledge and dispel ignorance on the topic of fur farming and the fur business in general. Ask away, Domeboians.

[featherlou]

What do you farm? How long have you been doing it? Have you been the victim of attacks? Does your fur farm treat its animals ethically?

Thanks for starting this, vison. I really am curious about what really goes on in the fur industry.

[vison]

We have a mink farm. We've been here since 1966, but we had a farm somewhere else for a few years. We have not been attacked by animal rights activists, but friends of ours have.

Well, we think we treat them ethically. It's the thing that's so hard for farmers to explain: you love your animals. You couldn't be a livestock farmer if you didn't. So, yes, we raise them and then we kill them. While they are alive they are well treated. My husband is an intensely humane man, which might seem odd, but it's true. I no longer work full time in the farm, but I do all the record keeping and the bookkeeping, etc., and help out at certain times like breeding season, and vaccinating, etc.

We are not a large farm, right now we have about 2300 adults and 10,000 kitts. The kitts were born in the first week of May and will be "pelted" (killed) for their fur in December. We keep the breeding stock over the winter. Breeding season here is from about March 8 to 24.

[CRSP]

Where do you sell your fur too? Is there much domestic demand for it, or is it all sent for export?

[What Exit?]

What do you do with the pelted minks?
How much space do you need for 12,000 minks?
How can you vaccinate so many? Is it shots or food additives?
Are minks usually as vicious as I have heard?
What does a pelt sell for?

Thank you for this thread,
Jim

[Harlequin]

It's the thing that's so hard for farmers to explain: you love your animals. You couldn't be a livestock farmer if you didn't.

So why do all the horror stories happen?

[ivan astikov]

It's the thing that's so hard for farmers to explain: you love your animals. You couldn't be a livestock farmer if you didn't.

So why do all the horror stories happen?

Which is why I don't buy this crap about "loving" their animals! If they didn't make a profit off them, they wouldn't raise the things. The horror stories probably happen when the farmer doesn't have the wits to make an ethical profit any more, or tastes are changing and they can't diversify. I just don't understand how someone can expect to be in the same business forever, in this day and age?

[Harlequin]

I'm sure vison feels affection for the animals. I'm just not convinced that you couldn't be a livestock farmer without feeling it. I think there are many farmers out there who don't give half a shit for their animals' well-being.

[ivan astikov]

I'm sure vison feels affection for the animals. I'm just not convinced that you couldn't be a livestock farmer without feeling it. I think there are many farmers out there who don't give half a shit for their animals' well-being.

I agree; you'd have to be pretty heartless not to have some empathy for them, and I don't think vision is that person either. I do believe there are farmers of all kinds who are not in it to maximise profits - although that in itself would make them a rare breed - and do it because it is what they know best.

Then again, at one time, some people's specialities were breeding bulls for baiting, but times change and the world moves on.

Have you never thought mink farming has had its day, vision?

[vison]

The mink skins (pelts) are sold at auction. Ours are sold in Seattle; there is another auction in Toronto. We send the pelts to the auction house. Graders there sort them by sex, size, colour, and quality. They are then intersorted with pelts from several other farmers with similar mink, and "lotted up" into bundles, then listed in a catalogue. Buyers from all over the world bid on them. Right now most mink skins are bought by Chinese buyers, and many of the pelts are made into garments for Chinese consumption. However, garments made in China are sold everywhere in the world and if you were to go to a store and buy a coat the chances are that it would have been made in China - no matter what the label says. Chinese furriers are not inferior, the workmanship and design are very, very good. Korea is an important buyer, and Italy and Greece continue to be important as well. Russia is a steady consumer of fur - it seems like every Russian wears a fur hat and a big male mink pelt makes a dandy hat. Since the fall of the USSR, the state farm system has collapsed, so few Russian fur farms exist. There is still a healthy trapper population in Russia and Siberia, etc.

Despite what the animal rights people say, the market for fur has never been stronger. Their activities have had no effect as far as reducing the numbers of pelts sold, nor the prices we get. They may have frightened a few people away from fur coats, in England and Germany, but those were never important markets anyway. I have never known a person who was accosted or insulted for wearing fur. The thing that most affects our prices is the strength of the American dollar - the pelts are sold in US dollars and when the dollar is strong,foreign buyers cannot get as much for their ruble or yen, or whatever. However, the American dollar is now more than 30% weaker than it was a few years ago, so our prices are much higher. I would guess the average 2009 price for a North American male mink pelt would be about $50 - $55 US, a female pelt about $35 - $40 US. In 2008, the average across the board for Canadian and American pelts was $60 US.

Male pelts are much bigger than female pelts and male leather is heavier and the fur is coarser. So female skins are used for coats and jackets and males generally for trim or hats, etc. I have a full length coat, I mean right to my ankles, and it took 50 female skins to make it. It would be about a size 14, I guess. Since I live here in the Banana Belt, I don't get to wear it often. I have a couple of smaller garments that I get more wear out of, but there is no doubt that a full length coat is a splendid thing.

Real fur is warm. No synthetic can match it. And given the fact that even trapped fur is used in a sustainable way, there is no reason not to wear fur. Unless, of course, you are opposed to humans using animals for food or clothing.

The carcasses from our farm go to incineration. Some farmers compost them, as I mentioned in the other thread.

We have 22 acres of land, more or less square in shape. The mink yard is in the middle of the property since when we built here 44 years ago we had to abide by the bylaws that said mink sheds had to be at least 100 metres from any property line. That requirement has been amended, but we have not altered our yard layout. We have 18 sheds, there are about 13,000 pens in those sheds. The sheds are roofed and partly side-walled, but are quite open to the air.

Each mink is given a shot of vaccine from an automatic syringe. That means each mink is caught and held while someone (usually me) gives it a shot of 4-Way vaccine: enteritis, botulism, distemper, pseudomonas pneumonia. Taking it easy and doing the vaccinating only in the cool morning hours, we did about 1,000 a day. Only this year's kitts get vaccinated, that was about 10 or 11 thousand.

Mink do not like being handled, so they struggle and bite and spray their strong musk smell. They have very sharp teeth and I have been bitten hundreds of times over the years. However, the bites are clean and no one I know has ever had an infection from a mink bite. Scratches are different, they can be very dirty. I wouldn't call them vicious, though. If they get out of the pen, they will run rather than attack. However, since they have been farm raised for many generations, they don't really know what to do if they get loose and will hang around the sheds. The odd one does make a run for it and the local streams and rivers have big populations of wild mink that may have some connection to escaped farm mink - but there are still thousands of wild mink in BC anyway.

Canada and the US are small potatoes in the mink farming world, though. The big producers are Denmark and Holland, and who knows how many in China. About 45 - 50 million mink skins moved through the auction houses this season, and only 3 or 4 million were North American. However, North American mink is the world's best, particularly mink from the west coast as in BC, Washington, and Oregon. There are huge fur auctions in Copenhagen and Helsinki.

Our mink are fed the byproducts of the fishery and poultry processors. We also feed a commercially prepared cereal. But mink are carnivores and the diet is mostly fish and chicken, the cereal just more or less binds the feed so it can be fed from an automatic feed cart and doesn't fall through the wire onto the ground.

[vison]

It's the thing that's so hard for farmers to explain: you love your animals. You couldn't be a livestock farmer if you didn't.

So why do all the horror stories happen?

What horror stories in particular?

It seems like every time there is a "farmer" who mistreats his stock, it turns out to be some idiot with horses. What kind of "farm" is that? Just recently a woman was charged with animal cruelty for keeping 20 horses - why did she have them? They just stood around in a bare field and basically starved to death because she couldn't afford to buy feed for them. She's a legal secretary. Yet in every story about this moron, she was called "a farmer". Bollocks, I say.

A farmer, as far as I'm concerned, is someone who makes a living being a farmer. Why would any farmer mistreat the very source of his income? Self-interest alone would seem to dictate good animal husbandry.

I was brought up on a farm, and I have always lived on a farm. I have never known a real farmer who deliberately mistreated his animals. Not all farmers "love" animals, I suppose, but since farming is a hard way to make a living I wonder who would do it if they didn't like it?

The concept of "factory farming" is another issue, of course. I have many strong opinions on that!

[Harlequin]

The concept of "factory farming" is another issue, of course. I have many strong opinions on that!

That sounds like what I'm talking about. Tell me about your opinions on it.

[featherlou]

I was raised in the heart of farming country in Saskatchewan, and I'll vouch for farmers and their animals. Farmers are pragmatic folks; you don't make money off of sick, starved, unhealthy animals. Just because a farmer raises calves to be slaughtered and eaten doesn't mean that they go out and give them a kick every day just because they're there.

It sound like you do not consider your mink farm a "factory farm," vison. Does that mean that your animals have a decent amount of room to live and run around (rather than being bound in tiny cages and treated like living machines)?

[What Exit?]

Real fur is warm. No synthetic can match it. And given the fact that even trapped fur is used in a sustainable way, there is no reason not to wear fur.

Could you cite this part please? It runs counter to what I have heard.

[vison]

Real fur is warm. No synthetic can match it. And given the fact that even trapped fur is used in a sustainable way, there is no reason not to wear fur.

Could you cite this part please? It runs counter to what I have heard.

Which part?

Maybe the warmth of real fur vs synthetic is a judgement call, but people who live in very cold climates generally prefer real fur. Synthetics are usually made from some petroleum ingredient.

Real fur is a natural product and is biodegradable, besides being created from the waste products of other food production. At least for farmed fur, such as mink and fox. Wild fur is trapped within strict guidelines regarding numbers of animals taken and methods of trapping. I can't say much for sure about trapping in the former USSR, but in the US and Canada it is heavily regulated. Besides, think about it. If you are counting on trapping for some or all of your income, would you kill every animal for its skin? Or would you be careful to ensure that there are future generations? Trappers are quite capable of figuring that out. I know aboriginal trappers from northern Canada, Alaska, and Siberia, and they're a pretty sharp bunch.

The real threat to wildlife is habitat destruction, not trapping. Is trapping "cruel"? "Cruel" is one of those words. Do I think animals can suffer? Yes, I think they can suffer. I think it is wrong to cause suffering, but then, I don't think killing an animal is making it suffer. I like to eat beef and lamb and wear fur. I think an animal should be killed quickly and humanely. But there are those who think it is impossible to do that. I can't argue with such people, it is like the abortion debate, there is no compromise.

When it comes to the factory farm thing, I confess that our farm, like most mink farms (probably all), falls on the factory farm side of the thing. We keep them in wire cages, but they seem content enough. How do you know an animal is content? They eat well and reproduce well, do not constantly try to escape, are quiet. We feed them very well, they grow much, much larger than wild mink. They are constantly cared for, fresh clean water at all times, protection from the wind and sun. They raise larger litters than wild mink do. They spend most of their time sleeping and eating. They are not "over crowded" in the pens, by the time they're full grown each mink has its own pen. They are not, by nature, social animals; in the wild they only consort with each other at breeding time. Each mink must find and defend its own territory in the wild. But our mink are domesticated, mink have been raised on farms for 100 years, that is 100 generations.

If mink had never been domesticated, neither my husband nor I would have undertaken to do so. We got into the business by the usual convoluted route that people seemed always to take 40 or 50 years ago. But we have had a good life, mostly. We've earned our living all these years, bought and paid for our farm (several times!), we have 5 full time employees, pay taxes, are part of our community. We are sure in our hearts that our animals are not mistreated.

Having said that, I am totally opposed to the way some chickens are kept, and some hogs. Our mink do not pluck out their own fur and struggle within a pen for room just to stand up. They are not confined in such a way that they can't interact with their babies; mink are very good mother animals, rather like cats, and we provide them with good nesting boxes and bedding, etc., unlike the poor sows that farrow in crates and never get to interact with the piglets. We keep them as humanely as possible.

My opposition to "factory farming" is not simply with animal welfare issues, although they are very important. There are so many problems! Overuse of antibiotics, disposal of manure contaminated with antibiotics, chemicals, and disease. A separate discussion, I suppose.

[What Exit?]

Why are the carcasses incinerated instead of becoming feed for other carnivores? That seems wasteful. Is it more cost effective to just burn them? Is there no market?

As far as sustainable harvest, when not regulated that is always a joke. There are always those that will think short term instead of long term. Many animals have been lost forever to non-sustainable harvesting.

My understanding is that many synthetic furs are actually as good or better than most real furs with a few exceptions. Sea Otter fur being the main exception. Your statement of preference does not carry the same force as a scientific study but I also cannot think of any studies to cite in either direction on it.

[vison]

Why are the carcasses incinerated instead of becoming feed for other carnivores? That seems wasteful. Is it more cost effective to just burn them? Is there no market?

As far as sustainable harvest, when not regulated that is always a joke. There are always those that will think short term instead of long term. Many animals have been lost forever to non-sustainable harvesting.

My understanding is that many synthetic furs are actually as good or better than most real furs with a few exceptions. Sea Otter fur being the main exception. Your statement of preference does not carry the same force as a scientific study but I also cannot think of any studies to cite in either direction on it.

Mink, like all animals, can carry the infectious agent for the disease that is manifested as BSE or CJD. Once upon a time the carcasses were rendered to obtain a fine oil, but I don't know if that is still done. Regulations vary from province to province and country to country.

"Many animals have been lost forever to non-sustainable harvesting" is true enough as far as it goes, but often the "harvesting" was a result of expanding settlements rather than hunting or trapping for a living. Such as the slaughter of nearly all the bison in the Great Plains. I don't know of any North American animal exterminated by trapping, though.

Wearing synthetic instead of real fur must, of course, be a personal decision. But I know how synthetic fur is made and I know how real fur is made. It's like preferring butter to margarine, as far as I'm concerned. There are probably scientific studies that can compare certain aspects of real fur vs fake fur, but I don't know offhand. However, those people I know who live in extreme climates do prefer real furs. That's not to say it's a universal thing in Dawson City or Iqaluit, but it is among those people I know.

[Harlequin]

Our mink do not pluck out their own fur and struggle within a pen for room just to stand up.

There are the horror stories I mentioned. How big are your pens (and how big is your average mink)?

The mink yard is in the middle of the property since when we built here 44 years ago we had to abide by the bylaws that said mink sheds had to be at least 100 metres from any property line.

Missed this the first time. What's the reason for this rule?

[vison]

The pens are 18 to 24 inches deep, 24 inches long, 18 to 24 inches wide. Some of our older pens are bigger. The "average" adult female mink is about 14 inches long not including her tail. The average male is larger, maybe 20 inches? We don't measure them that way, I sort of have to hold my hands apart and guess. They will weigh, in December: females, up to 5 or 6 pounds at most; males, up to 11 or 12 pounds at most. They can lie down or stand up in the pens, they stand up to eat off the top wires. Around the middle of October a nesting box is dropped into the pens and filled with clean shavings. The shavings are topped up twice a week. This keeps the mink fur clean and also keeps the mink warm if it gets very cold. Mink don't grow fur to keep warm, they get fat to keep warm. So if they have a warm nest box they don't eat as much and will still stay fat. We like them to be fat, it makes the pelt larger. And, up to a point, the larger the pelt, the more we get for it, quality for quality.

The bylaws at the time we built (1965 - 1966) were the same for most farm buildings, it was supposedly to reduce the nuisance factor for the neighbours. Mink farms can be stinky, as I know. We don't often get the smell at our house due to the situation of the house and the prevailing winds. But if it's kept clean and lots of shavings spread around, it's not so bad. If you live on a farm, you have to put up with the smell. I truthfully seldom notice it, after more than 40 years. The mink themselves have musk glands and can spray like skunks, but the smell is not as strong as skunks, nor do the glands release as much substance. However, they don't spray for fun, they only do it if they are being handled, or frightened.

There are mink farms where the mink are kept in much smaller pens. I know that there are federal regulations about it, but since our pens exceed requirements, I don't pay much attention to the regs.

However, since a damaged pelt is worthless we go to quite a lot of trouble to make sure the mink are content.

[Jeff]

Male pelts are much bigger than female pelts and male leather is heavier and the fur is coarser. So female skins are used for coats and jackets and males generally for trim or hats, etc. I have a full length coat, I mean right to my ankles, and it took 50 female skins to make it. It would be about a size 14, I guess. Since I live here in the Banana Belt, I don't get to wear it often. I have a couple of smaller garments that I get more wear out of, but there is no doubt that a full length coat is a splendid thing.

Banana belt? You mean the Lower Mainland/Vancouver Island? I grew up in Langley and there was a mink farm nearby. Some days you could smell it from a mile away, I believe it was in the news a long time ago due to someone sneaking in and opening the cages.

[PapSett]

I have heard that mink and other animals kept for fur are killed by anal electrocution. Is this true?

[vison]

Langley, yes. It was on 8th avenue. Still there.

Yes, sometimes you can smell a mink farm quite away off. But then, you can smell other kinds of farms, too, especially when the dairy farmers on the flats start spraying that liquid manure from the holding tanks . . . .

You have animals, including human animals, you are going to have shit. That's part of Nature's Great Plan.

[vison]

I have heard that mink and other animals kept for fur are killed by anal electrocution. Is this true?

I've heard this, too, but have no personal knowledge of it. Mink are not killed that way, at any rate. We gas them with CO, it is very quick.
At one time we injected them with nicotine sulphate and, believe me, it was quick. I injected many thousands and they died pretty much instantly.

The discussion of fur farming, or livestock farming in general, is often focused on how the animal is killed. I understand that, and I understand that people care about it. There is no nice way to kill something. That's the truth. When you sit down to eat that beefsteak, do you think about the life the steer led? Or about how he was killed? Most beef cattle finish their lives in crowded feedlots being pumped full of antibiotics and growth hormones, then are slaughtered in filthy conditions. Our mink are treated much better.

We do care about animal suffering and do not ever deliberately cause suffering or pain. If it's "cruel" to kill something, then we are "cruel".

[PapSett]

Honestly, Vision... I was not trying to start a debate on the morality of killing, I was just curioius if what I had heard was true or not.

I do eat meat. I love meat. I would MUCH prefer if the meat that I eat was kept humanely, but I am also realistic enough to know that it isn't always the case.

I *do* know if it were up to me to raise and butcher my own meat... I would become a vegitarian. I couldn't do it. Hypocritical? Maybe. But if I have interacted with that animal, no way I could kill and eat it.

It does sound like you use humane euthanasia, and I commend you for that.

[vison]

I honestly don't know if anyone kills foxes with anal electrocution. There are no fox farms in BC.

I've always lived on a farm. I always knew where meat came from. But that's the thing, I guess. We would have a steer or maybe a couple, and when the time came, Grandpa and Dad would kill and butcher the animal. They were not mistreated. Then, when I got married and lived on a farm of my own, we almost always have our own beef and lamb. We occasionally raise a pig.

We don't name the animals we're going to butcher. We don't make pets of them. But, I admit, it's a hard day when they go on the truck. We don't butcher at home any more. When they come back all cut up and frozen in brown paper, it's fine with me. I guess I'm used to it. I suppose I sound heartless, but it's just reality.

[Glazer]

If not pelted how long well a mink live ? How long do you keep breeding stock ? What is the ratio of male to female breeding stock ? Do you breed specifically for breeding stock, if so for what traits ?

That's all I got for now. Thanks.

[Jeff]

Langley, yes. It was on 8th avenue. Still there.

Yes, sometimes you can smell a mink farm quite away off. But then, you can smell other kinds of farms, too, especially when the dairy farmers on the flats start spraying that liquid manure from the holding tanks . . . .

You have animals, including human animals, you are going to have shit. That's part of Nature's Great Plan.

Was it on 8th? Then I could smell it a long way further than a mile. Unless as you say there was something else making the stink, though everyone always said 'oh that's the mink farm' when we caught a whiff of something.

[vison]

If not pelted how long well a mink live ? How long do you keep breeding stock ? What is the ratio of male to female breeding stock ? Do you breed specifically for breeding stock, if so for what traits ?

That's all I got for now. Thanks.

We have had several mink that lived 10 or 11 years. One was a male, the rest have been females. We've had 2 old females who had 10 litters - which is really quite amazing. Ten or eleven years is about it, for a mink. I don't think a wild mink would make it to 10. Ours had lost most of their teeth by then and would not have been able to do that rending and tearing of prey that mink are so good at. The feed we give them is ground up, sort of porridgey.

Ordinarily we would not keep a female after she had her 4th litter. Now and again we do as those really old females make excellent foster mothers. Each year we replace about 1/3 of our herd with young females. The ratio of males to females is 1 to 5.

The replacement breeding stock is the best of that year's crop of kitts. So theoretically every year our stock improves. It does, but it's a slow process. Pelting is in December, we keep the breeders over the winter and then breeding season begins on March 8. That's an arbitrary date for us, we could start on February 28 or March 10, but over the years we've found the 8th to be the optimum date. A female bred on the 8th will be bred again on the 16th and the 17th. The kitts are from the last matings, which we know from trying different colours and seeing which male is the father. There are no matings after about March 26 or so. Mink come into their reproductive cycle due to the increase in daylight hours in the spring and they enter their "furring up" cycle as the days grow shorter in the fall. This is very common in wild animals.

The act of copulation causes the female to release her eggs, which are fertilized at that time. If it is the second or third mating, it is believed that any eggs fertilized 8 days earlier are lost. Then, she holds on to those fertilized eggs and they do not implant right away, which leads people to believe that mink have a great variance in the length of gestation. In fact, once the eggs have implanted, it is probably exactly 42 days to the birth of the kitts. Most of our kitts are born from April 30 to May 6. A female can have one kitt or as many as 16, the commonest numbers would be 6, 7 and 8. If we can average 5 kitts for every breeding female kept, that is a good "crop".

Our breeding stock is selected for, first: litter size. A kitt must come from a big litter. Then the kitt must be a certain size, then we select for colour, and last for quality. A grader from the auction company will come and give us a hand at grading, each mink is caught and examined under a fluourescent lamp.

We do not keep pedigrees, as such, but my son adapted an Access program to generate our breeding records, do weight averages, etc. Each kitt gets its own card telling us its litter number (just a serial number starting with the first litter born), the number of kitts in the litter, whether they weighed less or more than the average, and what their mother's grade was. For breeding, each mink gets a different card that can hold more information; during breeding season we write the breeding dates and the male used, etc., then when the kitts are born a litter number and all the other stuff goes on the mother's card.

We have a pretty big data base now, and this fall the local community college is going to use our data base as a class project for a computer programming class. We'll get an updated and swell data base, will be able to generate a lot more information, and the college kids will have an interesting project.

[Glazer]

Ok now on to poo. How do you clean the houses? Sweep, Hose, Bulldoze? What do you do with the poo ? Compost, Sell, Landfill ? How often are the Minks cleaned ? How do you clean them ? Sprinklers? I imagine that the pens are stacked so do the ones on bottom catch a lot of crap? How much does one Mink eat in a day? And how much does it cost?

Thanks for the breeding answers.

[vison]

Ok now on to poo. How do you clean the houses? Sweep, Hose, Bulldoze? What do you do with the poo ? Compost, Sell, Landfill ? How often are the Minks cleaned ? How do you clean them ? Sprinklers? I imagine that the pens are stacked so do the ones on bottom catch a lot of crap? How much does one Mink eat in a day? And how much does it cost?

Thanks for the breeding answers.

The pens are not stacked! The poo falls through the wire mesh onto the ground under the pens and our guys go along with forks and a Bobcat and load it into a manure spreader and it gets spread on our pasture. It is excellent fertilizer, full of nitrogen since much fish passes undigested through the mink.

The mink do not need to be cleaned, although as I said earlier we put a nest box full of shavings into each pen in about October. They keep themselves clean like cats do. You get the odd one who poops in his nest box, that mink will lose his nest box.

Hm. Right now the half-grown kitts eat about a half a pound each every day. So we're mixing up a couple of tons of feed every morning. The feed costs about 15 cents a pound, I guess. Have to stop and figure it out. Yeah, that's about right. A lot of money, anyway. Of course, once the kitts are grown, their appetite lessens and the breeding stock we keep over the winter doesn't eat that much. I know our feed costs us about $15 per pelt over the whole year. Labour costs more. Then the other overhead. I generally assert that it costs us $40 a pelt all told.

[vison]

Here is a little thingy I wrote in the spring of 2008:

My husband and I and the gassoons went to the fur auction last week. I thought I'd talk about it a bit.

I first went to a fur auction in 1963, which is now an astonishing 45 years ago. We went to The Seattle Fur Exchange in its old premises, down on the waterfront around where Pike’s Place Market is now. The building was one of those ramshackle old warehouses with banks of many-paned windows letting in the cool harbour light, part of it was even on pilings.

When you went in the first thing you noticed was the smell of raw furs, not an unpleasant smell, but distinctive, leathery, strong. The next thing I remember noticing was the instant and clear difference between seller and buyer – and whatever else has changed over the years, that has not. In those days New York was the centre of the fashion fur trade, and many of the buyers were New Yorkers. There were a lot of buyers from Europe: Milan was the other centre. The fur farmers were almost all western Americans with a sprinkling of Canadians. These two groups of men were as distinct as is possible for men of the same exterior colour and shape.

Almost all of the buyers were Jewish. The fur business was traditionally a Jewish stronghold, and most of these men were carrying on the family business. Some were buying on a small scale, intending to manufacture the skins into garments themselves, some were brokers for larger manufacturers. But they all looked the same - all wearing the auction-provided blue coverall over their clothes, all with serious expressions, all moving at the same slow, slump-shouldered pace. Some wore yarmulkes. So powerful was the Jewish presence in the industry that no auction company would ever hold a sale on Saturday. They were aloof from us farmers, what was the end of our work year was the beginning of theirs. It was unusual for a buyer to speak to a farmer, there was some sense of impropriety there.

Not all were weary-looking New Yorkers with that typical wry New York face, though. A few stood out. One was a hugely fat man from Montreal whose bum hung over both sides of the seat of his chair and who once famously fell off the chair, sound asleep with a cigarette in his mouth. It took four men to get him to his feet and he never said a word. He actually died in one of those chairs and it wasn’t until selling ended for the day that anyone noticed. Then there was The Beard. The Beard was Mr. Rabicovitch, born in Imperial Russia, supposedly the son of a furrier who supplied the Czar with furs. The Beard looked just like Czar Nicholas, dapper and handsome, unusual for being bearded in a day when men were all clean-shaven, also unusual for being so beautifully dressed. He bought very little, but he added great tone to the proceedings. I was introduced to him, years later, and he kissed my hand, something I’ve never got over! Amongst the buyers were some who had survived the Holocaust, whose wrists were tattooed with those numbers. It seemed they were just like everyone else, which I guess is what they wanted to be.

The farmers, on the other hand, were recognizably not Jewish buyers from New York. They were as much a “type”, but a type that had more internal variety. Of the Canadian bunch, there were a number of immigrants from Germany and Poland, men who came here in the postwar years and seized the opportunity to buy land – land they could never have afforded in the old country. A mink farmer is free and independent in a way they could never have been “at home”. They were fiercely, madly, competitive with each other, senseless as it seems now. A lot of them were horribly anti-Semitic, I’m ashamed to say, and distrusted the Jews. The rest were a mixed lot with a heavy sprinkling of backwoodsmen who had begun in the fur business as trappers. Some wore jeans and plaid shirts, cowboy boots instead of shoes, rolled their own smokes. Some would wear suits and ties to the auctions, and didn’t like to be called “farmer”, they preferred “rancher”, which always seemed pretentious to me. Some even called themselves businessman, which I thought was beyond pretentious and into the realm of fantasy – at home a lot of these men wore gumboots and overalls and stank of raw fish. Although, come to think of it, it was very hard to imagine a couple of them in that way - those men were farming on a big enough scale to have lots of hired help.

Few of the buyers had their wives with them, but most of the farmers’ wives went. It was, and is, a social event as much as anything. There isn’t much we can do except watch our furs being sold, and gossip. Some of these farmers were very rich, these were grand days of fur farming, money-wise. But all the money didn’t turn farm wives into fashion plates, and that’s another thing I could never figure out. Oh, there was the odd exception, but usually they were just hardworking farm women who had money to spend and spent it wrong. Maybe because they didn’t live in or near the big cities where style is made, or maybe they never read Vogue magazine, I don’t know. What they did have was marvellous furs, the kind of furs queens and society women would desire, only made into clunky lumpy coats that sat awkwardly on them, not glamorous but the exact opposite.

The first sale I was at, we weren’t selling any furs, so I could look about a bit and find out how it all worked. In those days most farmers sold “on their own”. You’d send your raw skins in to the auction house, where they would be graded by quality and colour and “lotted up” into bundles, each bundle theoretically being enough skins to make a garment. Male mink skins are much larger than female skins, with longer hair and heavier leather – traditionally male skins went into scarves and stoles, hats and collars, while female skins were used to make coats. The skins were “raw”, that is, not tanned or, as we say in the fur business, not “dressed”. Not only were they raw, but they were sold “leather out”, dried with the fur inside, leaving the buyer a small inspection area at the butt of the pelt. The old experienced buyers could tell a lot about the quality of a pelt by that little bit, that and the smoothness of the leather. The buyers were demons for finding flaws, as they would never pay as much for an imperfect skin as perfect one. This was one reason so many farmers hated the buyers, they felt the buyers were being nastily unreasonable – yet these same farmers would bargain hard for anything they ever bought, not paying one cent more than they had to. I don’t know why they wouldn’t grant the same right to the buyers, but the feeling against it was pretty severe.

Once the skins were lotted up, they would be catalogued. The catalogue consisted then, and still does, of a list of skins by owner, beginning with the larger sizes and higher grades, and working down to the bottom end quality and size-wise. (This is an over-simplification, to say the least!!!) The farmers would be sent an “evaluation”, that being a rough guess by the auctioneers of what those furs might bring. The main concern was, then as now, catalogue position: like rock stars, you wanted to close the show. The further back in the book, the higher your quality. Dreadful rumours of payoffs and bribery would be put about by the disgruntled guy whose pelts were too near the front of the book.

In 1963 there were about 350 “mink ranches” in BC and I daresay there were similar numbers in Washington, Oregon, and Utah. The catalogues were long, page after page of one small farmer after another, selling as few as 10 or 20 lots or as many as 200 or 300: the number of pelts from each farm would seldom exceed 1,000. The sale took a long time, each lot was bid on separately. It was always too quick for us farmers, though, a whole year’s work gone in minutes, and you couldn’t call it back if you didn’t like the price. The buyers would buy a lot here and a lot there, often with an eye to combining those furs and making several or many garments. It was a tedious and time-consuming process and could not last much longer beyond the 60’s, the impetus of the fur trade drove farmers into selling in groups to provide longer “strings” of lots made up of bigger numbers of pelts, consistent in quality. The farmers hated this, they distrusted each other as much as they distrusted the buyers and the auctioneers, but in the end the “the trade” won out and the small sellers had no choice but to group lot. Now only the very large farmers sell on their own. And the furs are now sold “fur out”, instead of inside out.

Now, in 2008, there are 14 mink farms left in BC. I don’t know what the numbers are for Washington, Oregon, and Utah, but they will be similarly reduced from the 60’s. Yet we send more mink to market now than then, the sale I was just at put over 1.4 million mink skins into the system in 2 days of hard selling. North America is not a powerhouse in the production of mink, Denmark, Holland, and China are. They tell me that China sent 20 million skins to market this year, but we will not see them here, they are consumed in China. I also heard that many Chinese mink farmers “pelted out” this year, the issue of getting feed and supplies for mink farming in China are difficult to deal with. Rumours, rumours: the biggest, swankiest, richest American farmer is selling breeding stock to China, he is old and going to retire and doesn’t give a damn about selling the rest of us out. I can’t stand the guy for any number of reasons, but this is the main one: he knows he’s cutting our throats. Something like 45 million mink skins will go through this year, anyway, no matter where from.

Most of the mink farmers who went out of business went out because they couldn’t make a living at it. You had to expand or quit. We expanded, although we are still among the smallest farms on the continent. If we were younger, we might expand more, but it’s hard to get hired help these days, and we can’t afford to buy more land in an area where any old land sells for at least $100,000 an acre. This year, though, we needed a wheelbarrow to carry all the money home, it was the best auction in history with record prices for all colour phases. We’ll enjoy it while it lasts, because next year, what with one thing and another, the price could drop to below our cost of production, it has before and will again, sure as god made little green apples. Still, the market for fur never goes away, it’s never been affected by the anti-fur movement although they claim otherwise. One thing that drives prices is the strength or weakness of the American dollar, and now with the number of people in China, and elsewhere, with money to spend, fur is more in demand than ever. There is no end in sight right now, consumer desire in these formerly poor countries has to have an outlet, and expensive furs satisfy more quickly than hard-to-get cars or houses.

When I went to the fur sale in Seattle in 1963, there were 4 or 5 other fur auctions in North America: Western Canadian in Vancouver, owned by the Pappas family, Dominion Soudak in Winnipeg, owned by the Warner family, and the venerable Hudson’s Bay Fur Auctions, chartered on May 2, 1670, which held auctions in Montreal’s Beaver Hall Square and in New York City. There was Anning’s, in London, England, and half a dozen in Scandanavia. There were also fur auctions in the USSR, but they were generally a closed system, selling Russian furs to Russians. Except for Sables: only in Russia could you get Sable. Now there are 2 auctions in North America, American Legend and North American Fur Auctions in Toronto. NAFA was once The Hudson’s Bay Company, but the fur farmers of Canada bought it from The Bay when the oddball owner decided to get out of the nasty raw fur business.

Most of the mink in the world are black or dark brown. The fancy “high colours” like Sapphire and Violet are scarce for a variety of reasons, mostly being that if there aren’t many of them they bring good prices, but when there are a lot of them you can’t give them away. A woman is likely only going to have one mink coat and she will probably not want one where people say, “Oh, look, here comes Ethel wearing that fancy grey coat again!” A really nice black or dark brown coat “goes with anything”.

The crowd at the auction, now known as American Legend Cooperative, was a different crowd in many respects than at the first one I attended. The farmers are mostly familiar old faces, with the odd younger one taking over from Dad and Mum. But the buyers! Holy cow. A few New York and Milanese Jews are still there, getting old as fast as us farmers, more slump-shouldered, more wry-faced and weary, but outnumbered by hundreds of Chinese, Russians, and Koreans. And Greeks. Never forget the Greeks. China is the powerhouse of fur manufacturing now, I don’t think there is a manufacturer left in New York. The costs of making garments are much lower in China than in New York. And the Chinese make wonderful furs, there is no decrease in quality or splendour, the workmanship on the higher end garments is exquisite.

The auction company employs agents to deal with the Chinese and Koreans. They are all women, for some reason, a sprightly bunch with business degrees and atrocious fashion sense. I don’t know what it is, that the women in the fur business are usually such fashion disasters! I include myself in the fashion disaster group, of course, don’t get me wrong. This is not me speaking from some high-toned wonderfulness of style. There is an Italian broker who is definitely not a fashion disaster, though. She could have stepped from the pages of Italian Vogue, although she is getting, as they say, a little long in the tooth.

The Russians moved into the North American auctions after the fall of the USSR and the collapse of the state farm system. When they first came over here, they had no banking arrangements and literally showed up with briefcases full of American $100 bills. It was always a matter of intense speculation as to the source of all those greenbacks. The buyers had bodyguards with them, as a rule, big guys named Boris who wore really, really, really bad pinstriped suits with leather overcoats, like something out of a bad spy movie. Some buyers brought the wife or girlfriend and boy, could those women SPEND money. They would hit Nordstrom like hurricanes, buying clothes and shoes and having facials and haircuts and perms and dyejobs and by the end of the sale they would be very different looking than the Russian frumps who’d got off the plane. They would now look like high-end American tarts, but that was an improvement, all the way around.

The Russians are now old hands at the auction business, but it is still convenient for the house to employ translators and agents for them. These agents travel the world between sales, whether Korean or Chinese or Russian, getting the word out, soliticing business, gladhanding, doing things American-style. The chief of the Russian agents in Seattle is an exquisite young woman named Elena Somethingorotherskaya. Elena is as slim as a ballerina, graceful, beautiful in an old-fashioned ladylike way, dressed with understated elegance in clothes she sure as hell doesn’t buy in Moscow. She is tall, wears her very long dark hair in a chignon, such a knot of hair on the base of her slender neck that it gives her an air of fragility. I hear she is as smart as a whip and tough as they come. She has to be, I guess, to deal with those Russian buyers. She’s a treat to the eyes, at any rate, and her Russian accent is charming and attractive. She’s worth her little weight in gold to the auction house and I expect they have to pay her well – she could go elsewhere.

There is a pretty well-known brand of mink: Blackglama. “What becomes a legend most?” the slogan is, and women like Sophia Loren and Marlene Dietrich and Elizabeth Taylor and Cher and 40 or so others posed in black mink for photographer Richard Avedon in a series of famous posters. A couple of men: Luciano Pavarotti and Ray Charles. This was the 40th anniversary of the Blackglama brand and so there was a party on the eve of the sale. A party with an open bar, swell food, and better yet, an air of optimism about the upcoming sale. The selling season had opened in Copenhagen on February 2 with spectacular prices and since North American mink really are better than European there was every reason to expect a great sale. And, we were told there was going to be a mystery guest.

Was there ever. They had set up a little stage in the centre of the back wall and had crystal plaques and whatnot spread out on a little table. The chairman of the company made a little speech and we all listened like Hobbits at Bilbo’s party. Then there was a bit of a commotion at the back and we heard, “And here she is! Miss Cindy Crawford!” and indeed, there she was, Miss Cindy Crawford.

I never saw a supermodel up close before and about all I can say is, they aren’t like you and me. She seemed to walk in a different atmosphere than us common mortals, some kind of golden air perfumed with exotic and lovely flowers, her feet hardly seemed to touch the ground. I feel a little silly describing her, but she is so beautiful that superlatives just seem necessary. Even the word “beautiful” doesn’t do it. She is as tall and slim and lovely as it is possible to imagine. She is graceful and photogenic: people were taking pictures of her with their phones! and those phone pictures show her as lovely as any magazine cover. She played her part in the proceedings with smiling ease, her speaking voice as nice as her lovely face, being kissed by the lucky men who were getting their 40 year plaques as shippers or buyers of Blackglama furs. One of those men is Sal S., who looks enough like Cary Grant to be his clone, only taller and more athletic than Grant and it was fun to hear the old guys, those old New York guys, whistling and cheering when Sal, blushing like a kid, pecked Miss Crawford demurely on the cheek and stumbled off stage. Sal isn’t a 40 year man, his late dad was, but “the firm” qualified.

When Miss Crawford left, the steam ran out of the party. We hung around outside in the clear Seattle sea-air, then back to the hotel. The boys wanted a swim, and Grandpa joined his buddies in the bar and I sat. The next day our sale opened with a bang, such prices I have never seen before, a wonderful thing for people who work as hard as our bunch. Some years you sit in numb, dumb, anguished silence while five minutes of hard selling brings you $5 less than it cost you to put that pelt on the market. Other years, you say, “Okay, we can manage with this”, and for Canadians there was the exchange rate to sweeten a bad year. But this year we were all smiling, this year means needed repairs, some new equipment, some money put away. The buyers don’t mind spending money when the mood takes them, and they knew they had to spend it this year. One old Greek guy told me he came expecting to pay $90 and he had to quit when the bidding went over $100 on page after page after page of Blackglama mink. He was shaking his head and grimacing and I wanted to say, “Yeah but you never care if you grind us down,” only I didn’t. I know they’re in business too, they aren’t going to spend one cent more than they have to, and why would they?
Old adversaries are old friends now, the few that are left of that old guard. Alvin G., one of the New York boys who was young when I was young, always gives me a gruff “Hello” and a nod, which coming from him is a lot. He’s all business, although he sounds just like Sid Caesar when he talks. I keep waiting for the punchline, but it never comes.

The Chinese and Koreans stay together but apart from each other nation-wise in the back room when they aren’t bidding, they speak no English and don’t kibitz, they play some strange card game and throw $100 bills on the table like we’d throw Monopoly money. They can’t believe that they have to go outside to smoke cigarettes! But the auction brings in truckloads of wonderful Chinese food for them and we who like Chinese food slip into their lineup, ignoring the awful Yankee Pot Roast provided by the western caterer.

All in all it was a good trip. I always like the drive as far as Everett, after that it’s just traffic traffic traffic until you wonder if anyone actually ever does get across from one side of Seattle to the other. The kids always want to know where Bill Gates’ house is and we always point to one and say “That’s it” and they always know we’re making it up.

The fur business is not much of a player on a world scale, but it’s a very interesting business. I could go on and on for pages and pages and pages talking about the way you grow a mink and the way the skin is made into a coat. I could talk about the characters, like for instance one famously wicked guy who was rumoured to be a heroin addict, who always had a new, pretty “assistant” with him at every sale, who wore velvet suits and custom made patent shoes and who never bought a skin, that I saw. Or the famously gay buyer who always managed to entice some young guy up to his room - to see his pattern books. He was from Windsor, Ontario, and wore a real leopard skin coat when such things were still allowed. Or the farmer from Nova Scotia who wept real tears the year he didn’t make enough money to buy his annual new Cadillac – in front of people who were made broke at the same sale, going home to sell out. He was a jerk in every way, that guy, but the karma chameleon got him, the karma chameleon always does.

There are those who think it’s wrong to wear fur. Well, I can see that point of view even though I don’t agree with it. But it’s an old, old business, one of the oldest. There’s a lot of tradition and pride in it yet, strange though that seems. Like most farming, it’s a tough way to earn a living. The buyers and manufacturers aren’t on Easy Street, either. Fashion, as they say, is a hard task-mistress.

[What Exit?]

Epic post. Thank you for sharing all of that vision.

[Harlequin]

Just one little thing that apparently bothers me more than it does vison: there's only one i in her name.

[What Exit?]

Just one little thing that apparently bothers me more than it does vison: there's only one i in her name.

My apologies, I have been thinking of her as Vision all this time and I was lucky enough to lowercase the V at least.

[vison]

It doesn't bother me, but the thing is, vison is French for mink.

[What Exit?]

It doesn't bother me, but the thing is, vison is French for mink.

I learned something else new then.

[featherlou]

That really was an epic post - it should be in Maclean's magazine, not languishing away in a backwater message board.

[Myglaren]

This has turned out to be a far more interesting thread than I originally imagined it would be.
Excellent responses and the marathon post was superb.

[Glazer]

Clap. Clap. Clap. Front page, front page.

You mention that you and your husband are getting older. Are any of your children or grandchildren planing on taking over the farm and keeping it in the family ?

You also spoke of growing the business. With the change in regs on how close to the property line you can build, could you expand on the land you already own ?

How much longer do you plan on active farming ?

As always thank you very much.

[vison]

Hey, I'm glad you guys found it interesting.

Neither of our sons wants to be a mink farmer. The grandsons? Too young to tell, but my guess is No.

We could expand a lot, but it's not something we plan to do. The cost of more sheds and pens would be huge, and we would need to hire more people and I don't know if it would pay off. My husband is 68 and still works every day although he doesn't work quite as hard as he used to, due to arthritis, etc. I don't know what he would do without the farm. I don't like to think about it, really, it's all he's ever done and he never took up any hobbies or anything. He always says if he drops dead out there we are supposed to just run him through the grinder and feed him to his mink and you know what? He's not entirely kidding.

At this moment, we plan to keep farming forever. Or as close to it as we can get. We have those 2 boys to bring up, so we can't afford to retire. And if we ever do retire, we would have to sell the farm to have enough money to retire, the land is worth an astronomical sum. I don't want to ever leave this place, I've lived here since January 1966. But I don't think we could afford to live here if we weren't farming.

Sounds stupid, probably, but we don't think about it too much. We get up every day and go to work. If one of the boys wants to farm, we'll work something out.

[missred]

Awesome thread, vison! You added some insight and perspective to an industry that I knew little about.

[ivan astikov]

Do you care at all what your pelts are turned into? If the vast majority were used to make handbags and other fashion accessories, as opposed to gloves and warm clothing, would you feel less like you are providing a worthy service industry?

[OneCentStamp]

Thanks, vison, for starting this thread. And thanks, Glazer and ivan, for asking literally all the questions I wanted to ask.

[vison]

Do you care at all what your pelts are turned into? If the vast majority were used to make handbags and other fashion accessories, as opposed to gloves and warm clothing, would you feel less like you are providing a worthy service industry?

The pelts are all turned into garments. Scraps are used for trim, such as handbags and funny things to pin on your coat.

I don't care what is done with the pelts. They can be cut up into Qtips for all I care - what I care about at that point is that we get well paid for the pelt. Still, the furs are beautiful, and the garments made from them are beautiful as well.

I don't feel like we are providing "a worthy service industry". That's not why we're in business. We're farming to earn our living.

Having said that, we do so in an honest way and since we are raising animals for our living, we strive to do it humanely.

[Raymond Onion]

Is it too late for a couple of questions?

1. If you were a world traveler, where would be the best place to go to buy a quality fur and get the best buy for your money?

2. How hot does it have to get before it's a good idea to put your fur in cold storage, if ever?

This is a great thread. But why was it here in August, when it was hot, and a lot of people didn't even want to think about warm clothing?

[vison]

Is it too late for a couple of questions?

1. If you were a world traveler, where would be the best place to go to buy a quality fur and get the best buy for your money?

2. How hot does it have to get before it's a good idea to put your fur in cold storage, if ever?

This is a great thread. But why was it here in August, when it was hot, and a lot of people didn't even want to think about warm clothing?

Probably the best buy would be in China or Korea. But then, in Alaska at the end of the cruise ship season, you can bargain. You can bargain anywhere with furs, though. The markups are almost as bad as in jewelry.

I don't put my furs into storage. Maybe I should. The problem is usually moths, rather than heat. I give everything a good shake and wrap it loosely it clean old sheets and hang it in a cool closet. But we don't get a lot of heat and humidity here, our climate near Vancouver is pretty temperate.

If you put out a lot of money for a good fur, I guess it would make sense to put it in storage over the summer, though. Moths can ruin your garment.

When you have one and are wearing it: don't sit or stand too near a source of heat for too long; when you sit down in your car while wearing it, hitch it up a bit so it doesn't develop a stretchy bit where your bottom is.

A furrier can rehabilitate furs, remodel or remake them. They can "reglaze" the fur, removing the oxidation that turns them reddish.

I don't know why the thread got started in August - just did, that's all.