What Is The Fur Industry?

What Is The Fur Industry?

In my previous post I talked about mostly statistics of the Fur Industry, but I never really said what it is. In this post I hope to give you a better explanation of what the Fur Industry is:

Fur Industry/Fur Trade/Fur Exchange:

The trade or selling of any kind of fur from any kind of animal.

The Fur Industry was originally called the Fur Trade which began about 300 years ago, in the early days of the country when it actually helped established the country. The Indians traded fur from animals such as beaver (which the Europeans made their hats out of) for tools and weapons. As the 1500’s came about, Europe began to develop a certain fondness for fur, this led to the Indians searching for other sources of fur which include fox, otter and mink. When Samuel de Champlain set up a fur post in Quebec, Canada, it became the “hub” for the fur trade in North America.

A recent survey that I set up was sent to my peers to measure the amount that people knew about the fur industry. The chart to the left shows that the majority of people I asked knew what the Fur Industry. But when I asked if anyone wanted of owned fur items, the responses became a little more mixed. This graph shows the responses when I asked if anyone owned fur items, as you can see more than half of the people weren't even aware if they owned something with fur.

Since I interviewed teens, this helps show me how their thoughts on fur trade may evolve as they grow older and learn more about the topic. My understanding is that enough people aren’t aware of my topic and need to be informed about it. My opinion about the Fur Industry is that although it helped develop our country, has gone too far. Due to over-hunting many animals have been hunted to endangerment or even extinction. One of these was the Caspian Tiger (to the left.) They went extinct due to mass extermination by the Russian government when they wanted the land that the tigers lived on in the cotton fields, the last of the tigers were hunted for their fur by trophy hunters. On the right is a picture of Benjamin, the last Tasmanian Tiger who died in 1938 in a zoo. They were blamed and killed by many farmers for eating their livestock, which was actually encouraged, and Van Dieman’s Land Company (a textile company) helped destroy the rest of their population.

After all this I am still curious as to how the governments (of different places) decides when “enough is enough” when animals are becoming endangered due to the fur industry and even other problems like pollution, hunting, habitat destruction, etc. I also want to know what plans are being created and are already in motion to protect the animals facing all of these problems.

For my next blog post I am going to be informing my peers at school and through social media resources (Facebook, Twitter) about the Fur Trade.

Here is my bibliography.