Fur Tyrants

By Walter Williams

[Reprinted from Issues & Views Winter 1999]

A California organization parading under the lofty name of Beverly Hills Consumers for Informed Choice successfully gathered enough petition signatures to force the Beverly Hills City Council into holding a special election on May 11.

Among the celebrities who signed the petition were Jack Lemmon, Jay Leno, Vidal Sassoon, Pat Boone and Sid Caesar. The purpose of the election is to let voters decide whether to enact an ordinance mandating that all fur goods with a value greater than $50 bear a warning label that reads, "Consumer Notice: This product is made with fur from animals that may have been killed by electrocution, gassing, neck-breaking, poisoning, clubbing, stomping or drowning, and may have been trapped in steel-jaw leg hold traps."

The Beverly Hills group, a more respectable front for radical animal rights groups, has no intention of settling for fur warning labels. Its ultimate goal is the complete outlawing of fur manufacture and sales. You say: "Come on, Williams, they're just calling for labels. What makes you think differently?"

First, let's analyze the strategy of tyrants. Tyrants never reveal their true agenda upfront. They always start off with something relatively benign and sometimes quite reasonable. Then they incrementally become more oppressive.

The tactics of the cigarette Nazis are an excellent example of their methods. Like the Beverly Hills Consumers for Informed Choice, cigarette Nazis started out demanding laws requiring cigarette manufacturers to put warning labels on their product. Emboldened by that success, they successfully demanded no-smoking sections on airplanes. Then they demanded no smoking at all on airplanes, then airports, then restaurants, workplaces and bars. The rest of the story includes confiscatory cigarette taxes, lawsuits against tobacco companies, and even promoting and condoning violence against people smoking cigarettes.

If animal rights activists get away with mandating warning labels on furs, you can bet they'll demand warning labels on beef, veal, chicken and fish products. These people actually believe that humans are no better than animals. You say, "Come on, Williams, give us a break!" I'll give you a break, all right, with the exact words of Ingrid Newkirk, director of People for Ethical Treatment of Animals, "The smallest form of life, even an ant or a clam, is equal to a human being."

Animals are killed far more humanely than they've ever been. According to Teresa Platt, executive director of Fur Commission USA, an association representing mink and fox farmers, "For mink, the preferred method is gas, and for fox it's injection. But occasionally, it's something different." Gas and injection rather than stomping and neck-breaking serves the economic interests of furriers. Skins are not damaged, making for more product and greater profits.

The Beverly Hills Consumers for Informed Choice might be decent, well-meaning people, but they are useful idiots for animal rights wackos like PETA, who are evil people who sabotage experimental laboratories and assault people wearing furs.

— Walter Williams is Chairman of the Department of Economics at George Mason University (Fairfax, VA) and author of The State Against Blacks (McGraw-Hill). Do The Right Thing: The People’s Economist Speaks and More Liberty Means Less Government: Our Founders Knew This Well (Hoover Press) are collections of his syndicated columns. ©1999 Creators Syndicate, Inc.

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