The Animal Highlight
Set around specific themes, The Animal Highlight offers glimpses into the wonderful and complex worlds of animals. This is a spinoff of The Animal Turn Podcast, a podcast that unpacks important concepts in animal studies.
The Animal Highlight
S5E7: European Wildcat
In this Animal Highlight, fellow Virginia Thomas uses one of Jo-Anne McArthur’s images as her inspiration. She compares and contrasts the lives of mink kept for fur with those of wild mink before reflecting on some of the ethical and environmental concerns that emerge from using mink for fur.
Recorded: 12 October 2023
Featured:
- S6E7: Animal Photojournalism with Jo-Anne McArthur on The Animal Turn.
- We Animals Media
- Covid Outbreaks On Mink Farms Stir Controversy Among Scientists on NBC News NOW
- American Mink and the Cost of Fur by Virginia Thomas.
Virginia Thomas is an environmental social scientist with a PhD in Sociology. She is interested in people’s interactions with their environment and with other animals. Virginia’s work explores the social and ethical questions in human-animal relationships. She is currently a research fellow on the Wellcome Trust funded project ‘From Feed the Birds to Do Not Feed the Animals’ which examines the drivers and consequences of animal feeding. This leads on from her previous research which examined human-animal relations in the media (as part of zoonotic disease framing) and in rewilding projects (in relation to biopolitics and human-animal coexistence). You can connect with Virginia via Twitter (@ArbitrioHumano).
Credits:
- Claudia Hirtenfelder, executive producer, editor and co-host
- Virginia Thomas, script write, narrator and co-host
- Rebecca Shen, content producer and designer (logo and episode artwork)
- Gordon Clarke, bed music composer
- Sound clips taken from: BBC Sound Effects, We Animals Media, NBC News Story: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6PbsuGGWUrM
- Learn more about the team here.
Support the podcast via:
- Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/join/TheAnimalTurn
- Buy Me a Coffee: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/theanimalturn
- Buzzsprout: https://theanimalturn.buzzsprout.com/
Animals in Politics, Law, and Ethics researches how we live in interspecies societies and polities.
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The Animal Highlight is a spinoff and sister podcast to the award winning show, the Animal Turn Podcast.
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This is another iRaw podcast. We podcast to make the world a better place for animals.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Welcome back to season five of the Animal Highlights, where we're focused on animals and politics. All the content from this season has been extracted from season six of the Animal Turn podcast, which is a season of the same name Animals and Politics. Joanne MacArthur, the award-winning and incredible animal photojournalist, joined me on the show to talk about how media and photos are connected to politics and thinking about animals and politics. So we decided to use some of Jo's images to think a little bit more about that. So in this episode, virginia uses MacArthur's images as her inspiration. She compares and contrasts the lives of mink kept for fur with those of wild mink, before reflecting on some of the ethical environmental concerns that emerge from using mink as fur. Hi, virginia, it's good to have you back on the show.
Virginia Thomas:It's really good to be back. It feels like a long time this time, for some reason.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Yeah, it's been a spot of time, but we're nearing the end. I can't believe that we're so close to the end of the season and this episode was really wonderful. I very much enjoyed speaking to Joanne. Her photography is unbelievable, so I believe you've got something in line with Joanne's episode in store for us.
Virginia Thomas:Yeah, absolutely. I really enjoyed looking at them and Joanne's striking photographs of mink on fur farms are the reason I'm highlighting them in this episode. And even though in themselves Joanne's images are confronting and even repellent, the beauty of the mink stands out and transcends their squalid surroundings. And even though I'm imposing anthropocentric standards of aesthetics onto animals, mink really are beautiful. They're in the same family as otters and stoats. They have the same long live bodies, the same grace and speed, and they have facial proportions which people find endearing because of their cute attributes. There are two kinds of mink the American and the European. The IUCN classifies the European mink as critically endangered, but the American mink as of least concern. It's the American mink I'm focusing on because they're the ones found in fur farms. In fact, the American mink has the unenviable record of being the animal most farmed for their fur. But let me tell you about mink in the wild before I get onto fur farming.
Virginia Thomas:Mink are described as semi-aquatic, always live close to water and even when they're moving around a landscape they tend to follow water lines. They have webbed feet, which makes them excellent swimmers, but they're just at home on landers in the water and they can borrow and climb as well as swim, so they're really adaptable little animals and they're also really self-reliant, being entirely solitary as adults, except for mating. Because they're solitary, mink and the wild rarely meet each other, so they communicate mostly through scent, leaving chemical messages to mark their territory or to find a mate. They also vocalise, though, and they purr when they're content, in the same way as cats do. Let me contrast this with the experience of mink on fur farms. On fur farms, mink are kept in battery cages, usually with other mink and with no access to water to swim in. Remember, they're semi-aquatic, solitary animals, so being deprived of the opportunity to swim and being caged with others is detrimental to their well-being. When kept in such conditions, mink can become aggressive, even harming or killing each other.
Virginia Thomas:One of Joanne's photographs captures this poignantly. The image is called Life and Death in Fur Farming and was awarded Highly Commended in Wildlife Photographer of the Year in 2022. It's an image of mink crowded into a wire battery cage. The mink looks sleek and gray and impossibly clean, despite the squalor of their surroundings. A handwritten sign above the cage indicates how many mink are in it. The original number 10 has been crossed out and replaced by the number 8, scrawled in a different colour pen, it still seems an impossible number. If you try, you can count out six mink, leaving you to assume that the other two are squeezed into a corner somewhere because the cage is too small even for one mink. The image captures the casual and brutal attitude to life and death of the mink caught up in fur farming.
Virginia Thomas:In your interview, joanne said that animal photojournalism strives to show individual animals and the systems they're in, and I think this image does exactly that. Animal photojournalism often portrays individual animals like mink with care and sensitivity, while also highlighting concerns regarding the systems they're in, like fur farms. As a lay observer, I can see that in Joanne's photographs of mink in fur farms, she captures the character and essence of the mink while framing them within the harsh and brutal reality of fur farming, consciously exposing the dirt, disease, decay and death involved. There's an incredible pathos to the images. They evoke deep pity for the mink and also incredible sadness that fur farming can go on. There's also a horrible irony that the mink's incredible fur, which is so valuable to them for its denseness and waterproofness, is also valued by people. People take beautiful animals and subject them to almost unimaginably ugly process of fur farming to produce something which is considered beautiful or fashionable. It's worth talking a little bit about the wider issues in relation to mink fur farming and anti-fur campaigning. Issues in relation to mink fur farming and anti-fur campaigning. Human-animal environment relations are utterly entangled in fur farming and even anti-fur campaigning. This means that they have effects on animal, environmental and human health, so we can think about them from a one health perspective.
Virginia Thomas:Mink are adept at escaping from fur farms and they're also released by anti-fur activists. In fact, in Denmark, which used to be the world's largest producer of mink fur, it was thought that most free-living mink were escapees from farms. And because they're so adaptable, mink who escape or are released can have significant impacts on the ecosystems. They enter to the point that they're sometimes classified as an invasive species. The pollution from fur farms also has a significant impact on the environment, contaminating waterways and affecting aquatic life. Eutrophication and persistent organic pollutants have both been associated with fur farming in Nova Scotia and Canada. And lastly, as the COVID-19 pandemic demonstrated, diseases can be passed between humans and mink. We already knew that COVID-19 could jump from bats to humans. Now scientists say it's jumping from minks to humans and picking up genetic changes along the way. The transmission of COVID-19 from people to mink and mink to people resulted in the death of millions of mink 17 million in Denmark alone as they were killed as part of attempts to control COVID-19.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:We're taking all necessary and appropriate actions, including the culling of all remaining mink in Denmark.
Virginia Thomas:So, as with many other cases of human animal relations, it's worth thinking about the bigger picture when we think about fur farming. Mink fur, with its dense undercoat and long waterproof outer coat, which make mink so well adapted to their ecological niche, might be prized by people. But there's much more than just fashion at stake when we exploit mink for their fur. A mink fur coat might cost around £8,000, but the true cost of the coat includes the environmental and ethical cost as well.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Wow, that was really powerful. Thank you so much.
Virginia Thomas:Yeah, I found Joanne's photographs really powerful, so you know that I was really thinking about that when I was researching this highlight.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Yeah, the whole series, because there's several images there of mink farming and just they're so dark and, like you say, several animals squeezed and crammed into tiny cages, and animals that are really quite solitary don't enjoy being near others, let alone crammed into a cage where you can't leave, and you know that the capacity and that desire to leave and to get away and you can't right will often result, I think, in even more aggressive animals in the cage, harming those that are perhaps more timid. Yeah, just absolutely awful conditions, but those images really do capture kind of what's at stake for those mink.
Virginia Thomas:Well, that's what animal photojournalism does, isn't it? That's what Joanne was saying.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Yeah, but I also really appreciate here how you kind of unfurled fur farming because I think so often even us as folks that are interested in animal rights or animal welfare, you know we'll focus on how this results in massive harm, cruelty, death for the animals involved. But actually the effects of fur farming and of the exploitation of these animals are far-reaching. Like you say, there are now animals going into ecosystems that they can disrupt. There's massive pollution. Is it centrifugal that goes outwards? Is it centrifugal that goes outwards or is it centrifugal that goes out? I think it's centrifugal. Is it centrifugal that goes afterwards or is it centrifugal that goes? I think it's centrifugal. I'm going to go with centrifugal. I think the centrifugal.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:You know effects of fur farming and of any sort of farming are pretty intense. So thank you so much. That was amazing. Thank you so much to Virginia Thomas for being an incredible co-host and to Rebecca Shen for her work on the logo and all the artwork done with the animal highlight. The show was edited and produced by myself. This is the animal highlight with me, claudia Hüttenfelder.
Siobhan O'Sullivan:For more great iRule podcasts, visit iRulePodcom. That's I-R-O-A-R-P-O-D dot com.
