For Immediate Release: November, 28, 2002

Contact: Mercy For Animals (937) 652-8258

FUR FOES ASK
“WOULD YOU WEAR YOUR DOG?”

Man’s Best Friend Joins Anti-Fur Activists to Protest Killing of Animals for Fashion

Columbus, OH - Joined by man’s best friend, and armed with posters that dare to ask “Would You Wear Your Dog?” members of the Ohio animal rights organizations Mercy For Animals (MFA) and Protect Our Earth’s Treasures (POET) will ask consumers, on the busiest shopping day of the year, to make the connection between animals called pets and animals labeled pelts. On a mobile TV unit, the activists will air graphic undercover footage of animal abuse on fur farms.

Date: Friday, November 29, 2002

Time: 12 noon – 1 pm

Location: Lazarus at City Center Mall, 141 S. High Street

As the holiday shopping season begins, MFA and POET want consumers to know that minks, foxes, chinchillas, raccoons, and other animals on fur farms spend their short lives confined to barren, tiny, urine- and feces-encrusted cages constantly circling and pacing back and forth from stress and boredom. To the surprise of many potential fur buyers’, no federal law protects animals on fur farms. Farmers often kill animals by anal or genital electrocution, which causes them to experience the intense pain of a heart attack while fully conscious. Other killing methods include neck-breaking and suffocation. Sometimes animals are only stunned and are then skinned alive. Animals trapped in the wild suffer for hours or even days before trappers arrive to stomp on their chests or break their necks. The trapped animal is left to suffer blood loss, infection, gangrene, exhaustion, exposure, frostbite, shock, or attack by nonhuman predators. Every year, traps also cripple and kill hundreds of thousands of dogs, cats, birds, and other animals -- including endangered species -- who are caught by mistake.

“Most consumers wouldn’t dare to wear a fur, or fur trim, coat made out of beloved Fido,” says Mercy For Animals director Nathan Runkle. “There is no difference between the pain, suffering, loneliness, and fear experienced by animals called pets and those labeled pelts. If you’re wearing a mink, you might as well be wearing the family dog.”