How disgusting and revoking can this get??? Madonna wearing a coat made of dead chinchilla fur!!!!!!!!!! Hate her..
Read this report from
Independent Online Edition:
Madonna & the curse of chinchilla: What she should know about that coat
When she stepped outside to face the paparazzi in London last week, the singer might have known she was walking into a storm of protest about her £35,000 chinchilla coat. But could she have known the suffering that went into keeping her warm? We think she should be told, says Jonathan Owen
Published: 10 December 2006 Stepping out in London's Mayfair last week, Madonna had no reason to know she was about to walk into a new scandal. Still reeling from the row over her adoption of a baby boy from Africa, the 48-year-old, who started her career as the self-styled Material Girl of pop, was pictured smiling and happy as she left a restaurant with her husband, film producer Guy Ritchie.
But trouble was lurking. Pictures of her in a £35,000 chinchilla fur coat were flashed to newspapers and magazines around the world, provoking a storm of protest. Now animal campaigners are calling for a boycott of her music.
The coat - and thousands like it - represents the end product of a macabre trade. More than 40 animals were killed to make the latest addition to Madonna's wardrobe, but hundreds of thousands are bred on factory-style farms, then killed by strangulation or electrocution, campaigners claim.
"Madonna is showing herself up to be shallow and selfish and lacking in all compassion which, particularly in this season of goodwill, is regrettable," said Mark Glover from Respect for Animals. "The message she's sending out to her fans is contemptible and people should stop buying her albums until she stops wearing fur."
Anita Singh of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (Peta) said: "It is ironic that just weeks after struggling to prove she has a heart, adopting a child from Malawi, she comes out in support of one of the most violent industries on the planet. This is an industry responsible for bludgeoning, strangling, gassing and electrocuting small, defenceless animals for the sake of fashion.
"It is unfortunate for the millions of defenceless animals trapped on fur farms that have to suffer the horrific consequences for her vanity and that of others like her."
Chinchillas are shy, intelligent animals that can live for up to 15 years in the wild and are fast becoming one of Britain's best-loved pets. Fur farming has been banned in Britain since 2003, after heavy anti-fur campaigns in the Nineties, but chinchilla furs are still imported.
Mr Glover added: "The hypocrisy is perverse that, while the means of production is illegal, people are still able to buy and sell fur."
Photographs from an investigation by Peta depict the cruelty. Investigators got into a chinchilla farm in America (a major exporter) and saw babies taken from their mothers and put into "growing" rooms, with hundreds of chinchillas in small cages on top of each other.
Campaigners say many die from poor diets and neglect before they can be killed for their fur, and that animals often survive electrocution and are still alive when spread-eagled and skinned. Neck-breaking, described as "cervical dislocation" by furriers, and electrocution are the favoured killing methods. But a spokesman for US-based Empress Chinchilla Breeders Cooperative claimed: "Our members take better care of their chinchillas than they probably do their families. This is one pampered and cared-for animal. In the summer, they are kept in air-conditioned barns with fans for fresh air. In the winter, the barns are heated."
In Croatia, undercover investigator Jean Hubert, of the French animal welfare group One Voice, was forced to watch as a chinchilla took almost two minutes to die. "I saw a farmer electrocute a chinchilla in front of me by wiring it to a domestic power socket," he said. "It was awful. The animal kept twitching and as he was skinning it he kept prodding it to check it was dead. The animals are skinned immediately afterwards, and there will always be a proportion skinned while still alive."
The fur of the giant rodents, native to South America, is considered the softest in the world and is 30 times finer than human hair. The demand for their fur almost wiped them out and they are now endangered in the wild.
When the anti-fur movement was at its height, in the late Eighties and early Nineties, Madonna wore anti-fur T-shirts in public. But her interest soon waned and in 2001 she was pictured in a £1,000 fox fur hat. A year later, she was seen in a coat that campaigners claimed was made from the pelts of unborn lambs. Ironically, this latest scandal comes only days after Madonna announced that she will be designing clothes for H&M, a high street chain that has a policy of not using fur.
The star's long-time publicist, Barbara Charone, declined to comment but a friend, the vegetarian fashion designer Stella McCartney, said: "There's nothing fashionable about a dead animal that has been cruelly killed just because some people think it looks cool to wear."
Sales of fur clothing are up 30 per cent on two years ago, with fur products worth £40m imported every year in a market worth an estimated £500m in the UK. Figures from HM Customs and Revenue show that approximately 1,000 tons of fur are imported annually. The global market for fur is almost £7bn.
Cute Hor???
