ABSTRACT
SARS-CoV-2 was first identified in humans in December 2019 and has since affected almost 68 million people causing over 1.5 million deaths worldwide. Animal-to-human and animal-to-animal transmission has been documented within farmed minks in several countries. SARS-CoV-2 has been identified in a farmed mink population in a number of countries. Some of the affected farms reported also workers SARS-CoV-2 infection and it is hypothesized that the mink farms were infected through human-mink transmission proving SARS-CoV-2 capability of reverse zoonosis. This Tripartite Risk Assessment, as a joint effort under the GLEWS+ initiative, completed with the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the World Health Organization (WHO), and the World Organisation for Animal Health (OIE), evaluates the risk of introduction and spread of SARS-CoV-2 within fur farming systems as well as whether farmed fur animals could play a significant role in the spread of SARS-CoV-2 to humans via spillover. Additionally, using a One Health approach, the Tripartite evaluated the risk of the escaped minks leading to the establishment of a viral reservoir in susceptible wildlife populations. This work provides guidance to Members on this newly emerging threat.
ABSTRACT
This proceedings contains 43 papers on the behaviour, welfare, breeding, reproduction, feeding and diseases of mink, blue foxes and chinchillas, as well as the impacts of COVID 19 on fur farming.
ABSTRACT
Around 100 million animals are killed annually for the global fur trade, with 85% reared on fur farms and 15% trapped in the wild. Fur farming is banned across the United Kingdom (UK) under the Fur Farming (Prohibition) Act 2000 in England and Wales and parallel legislation in Scotland and Northern Ireland. Despite the farming bans, the import and sale of fur products to the UK have continued, largely due to European Union (EU) membership. The UK left the EU in 2020 and the British government is exploring a potential ban on the import and sale of fur post-Brexit. This paper reviews public surveys on attitudes to fur farming in the UK from 1997 to 2021. It then reports the results of an online questionnaire to investigate in greater depth the beliefs of UK residents (n = 326) about the welfare of animals used in fur production, knowledge of the legal context of the fur trade and attitudes toward a ban on the import and sale of fur in the UK. A large majority (86%) of respondents believed that fur-farmed animals do not experience a good life. Over four-fifths (83%) disagreed that it is morally acceptable for the UK government to ban fur farming and yet continue to import and sell fur from producers overseas, with over three-quarters (78%) supporting a legal ban on the import and sale of fur in the UK.
ABSTRACT
The recent mass culling of mink in Denmark and elsewhere, following the animals' contamination by a COVID-19 variant, is taken as a re-entry point into Derrida and Lacan's mink-mediated conversation in The Beast and the Sovereign. Out of the etymological 'stink' attached to the mink emerges an animot gifted with (unlimited) ink, with a potential to disturb philosophies of language, to write back or strike back, as it has recently done in the form of alignments of dead yet resurfacing animals. In the wake of Derrida's verbal disseminations around the vison, and of Lacan's attribution of a 'sort of language' to the animal in The Formations of the Unconscious, this essay follows an animal pack with includes the 17 million mink programmed for (double) extinction by inhumation and cremation. A hauntology follows, adumbrated by Lacan's interest in the 'secretion' of fur, mink oil and (psychoanalytic) sense, and by Derrida's encounter with the neoliberal, crypto-vison Alain Minc in 1994.