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Animal Welfare
The fur industry is a responsible industry. The IFTF and its members deplore cruelty to animals. The IFTF promotes strict codes of practice that meet or exceed established and accepted standards for animal welfare, for wild and farmed fur. The fur trade does not trade in endangered species.
All furs used by the fur trade are either farmed or are taken from abundant, sustainable populations in the wild. The IFTF and its Members support independent scientific research into animal welfare in farming, trapping, population and habitat conservation. The IFTF encourages and supports animal welfare legislation that is based on sound, objective scientific research around the world.
Please use the navigation buttons on your left to find out more about fur farming and wild fur, conservation and the environment.
A note on animal rights and animal welfare: There is a great deal of confusion about the difference between animal rights and animal welfare. This is a serious issue that we invite our visitors to consider.
Animal Welfare
People who support principles of animal welfare accept that we are on the top of the food chain and that animals are very important to us for many reasons, even vital to the survival of some communities. Animals have always provided us with food and clothing, and we have farmed certain species over thousands of generations to provide these things. Natural environments have been influenced and managed by human beings for longer. In modern times, numerous life-saving medical advances have been made possible only through being able to test procedures and drugs on animals. Therefore, given the huge and unending importance of animals to us and our massive influence over them, animal welfare supporters believe that we humans have a duty to care for the wellbeing of animals we come into contact with and to endeavour to conserve their natural eco-systems.
This is the belief of the IFTF and its members. We do NOT believe in animal rights.
Animal Rights
Animal rights supporters believe that animals ought to have the same rights as human beings and that therefore humans have no right to use or manage animals, for any purpose.
Therefore animal rights groups are against :
- Medical Research
- Farming / farmed animals
- Meat, Milk and Eggs (including organic)
- Hunting and Fishing
- Leather and Fur (including snakeskin, crocodile etc.)
- Wool, Cashmere, Pashmina, Angora, Silk
- Zoos / Circuses/ Animal shelters/Pets
- Horse-drawn carriages/ploughs etc.
Animal rights groups raise their profile and funds by campaigning against luxury animal products such as fur, leather, silk, cashmere, snakeskin etc. and their campaigns are very emotive. Animal rights groups aim to achieve their goal to remove consumersí choice to use any animal products by setting precedents. Through achieving bans on certain types of products, (despite these products being from regulated and responsible industries like the fur trade) it is easier to campaign to ban other types of animal products such as meat or wool, a precedent having been set.
The IFTF and its members believe that people have a democratic right to make their own decisions about what to do for a legitimate living, what to eat and what to wear, not to live in a world where a major choice is removed altogether.
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