Faux Fur

This catalog showed up yesterday amongst the dozens we get in the daily mail. The under weight but the for sure hot babe and the especially the fur caught my attention!!

Some history. When I was 14 I worked at a neighbor's farm on weekends and after school. This farm had 25 - 30 milking cows, a couple of Arabian show horses and an acre of outdoor penned mink. My pay for a 6am to 9pm weekend workday was $4 with meals. My skilled labor (I could milk the cows, handle the horses and run all the equipment including the John Deere B with the hand clutch.....) was worth 27 cents an hour in 1967. But I digress.

I worked there from Sept to May and experienced pretty much the full mink pelting cycle. In the fall the mink were heavily fed with fatty protein to fatten and shine them up. Feed was also processed and stockpiled for the winter months. Horse meat was the main ingredient. Surrounding famers and horse owners would leave their nags and we would "process" them. This consisted of a 410 slug to the forehead, a day of gutting, skinning, quartering and grinding the carcass. This was then mixed with a grain into a slurry and frozen into chunks of future mink feed. More on this part of my childhood in another posting.

Mid winter was pelting time. This process included killing, pelting and storing the pelts. I was one of a kill team of two. The other was a kid 2 years younger than me. One of us would reach into a mink pen with a mitted protected hand and grab the mink by the back of the neck and turn it over so its belly was exposed. The other would drive the needle of a steel syringe into its heart and inject a dose of strychnine. The mink would be dead nearly instantly, unless the needle missed the heart. Then the death might take minutes if we didn't drop it from the mad frenzy. Think OSHA would have approved?

The next step was the pelting which was done by a husband/wife team hired for this occasion and done in the basement of the farmer's house. These two were also the parents of my kill team partner. They would cut the hide of the mink at the neck and feet lines and then pull it back over the body of the mink in whole so it was completely inside out. It would then be stretched over a mink board for scraping and then drying and cold storing. The skinless carcass would be thrown into a pile with the others and hauled off to a back field and dumped. The smell of the dead carcasses and wet hides I'm sure still lingers.

Early spring was breeding time. The choice mink were spared from the pelting process and used for breeding stock. This was fun time for all. The males would be placed into a pen with a female and they would do nature's willy wag for hours on end. Each day the males would be moved to another pen until all the females were eventually covered. Little did they know that the deadly cycle was on repeat.

Why do I share this ugly history, especially with detail that would make most cringe including me? Anyone who wears or would even tolerate an animal fur item needs to understand the process by which these items are produced. When one is 14 and the extent of their world has been limited to a 50 mile radius of geography and culture then their viewpoint is extremely myopic. At the time it was just part of someone's business in the back hills of northen Vermont. Only after years of seeing a larger view of the world and gaining a better understanding of nature does one understand that this was so wrong on so many levels.

Back to the magazine. I was about to go ballistic when I noticed in the upper right corner the word "faux". A faux pax may have been in the making or perhaps not. Doesn't a faus somehow validate or at least acknowledge at some level the real thing?

That summer I took another job at a different farm that only had dairy cows but a 100 of them. And I got a raise to 36 cents an hour with room and board.