UK Special report: evil pet fur trade

Situated conveniently close to the Channel ports, the elegant Belgian furrier's shop is a magnet for well-heeled British tourists, who are drawn inside by an elegant window display of luxurious coats and stoles.

At a time when fur is making a comeback in haute couture circles - with stars such as Madonna defiantly flaunting animal-skin fashion accessories - business has rarely been better at the old-established boutique run by Piet vander Eycken.

The bespectacled Belgian's wealthy clientele might be less willing to bolster his takings, however, if they knew the full range of items in his sales catalogue.

For, hidden away in a stockroom, behind the racks of mink and sable, are the pelts of dozens of slaughtered domestic cats.

They are readily available in every shade, from ginger tabby, tortoiseshell and marmalade to deep chocolate brown.

Presumably, however, Mr vander Eycken (whose name has been changed for legal reasons) keeps these furs out of view for fear of causing offence.

Yet when anyone asks specifically for 'cat', he is happy, indeed proud, to parade his wares, as I discovered when I met up with a team from the Humane Society of the United States in a joint investigation into the burgeoning cat and dog fur trade.

"I can show you many colours,' he said, thumbing through piles of unmistakably sleek feline pelts, after we asked him to make us a cat blanket - or rheumadecker - which are believed by some on the Continent to be beneficial for arthritis and rheumatism.

"I think these particular ones have been farmed (in Belgium). But I have others that are not from farms. There are places where they catch them. For dogs, it is the same. They are caught and brought to a specialist institute and if no one picks them up they get shot."

'Cat hunters' at work in London

Not long ago, he said nonchalantly, the bulk of his cats were brought by ferry from England.

Ruthless 'cat-hunters' in London would go around in vans, rounding up pets, and bring them to him for sale (as he spoke I recalled how a cat of my own had once vanished without trace). Today, they are more likely to be caught in Ghent or Brussels.

Before our investigation began, the Humane Society had uncovered evidence that some two million cats and dogs were being killed each year, often by the most barbaric methods. But until now, they were believed to originate exclusively from China and the Far East.

But as Mr vander Eycken chatted to his customers, he unwittingly provided an insight into a more shocking - and hitherto unknown - aspect of the trade: that of clandestine cat-fur farmers and cat thieves operating in the heart of Europe.

Our video footage, shot recently during a week-long incognito visit to the furriers of Belgium, was passed to Scottish Euro MP Struan Stevenson and forms the centrepiece of his campaign to have the cat and dog fur trade banned in Europe, as it has been in the U.S.

Mr Stevenson explained: "We had to confront the assertion that there was no cat or dog farming in the EU or the 10 countries that are about to join, and your film did just that.

"We've had the rugs you bought tested microscopically to confirm they are cat. And apparently these cats are being farmed, or collected, on the streets of Belgium, right under the noses of the EU commissioners who sit in their ivory towers and say it is just not happening."

Brussels bureaucrats were refusing to initiate a ban, he added, because the World Trade Organisation says it is unlawful to prevent trade on animal welfare grounds. But the sale of cat fur ought to be outlawed under consumer fraud leglislation, because products were almost always fitted with misleading labels.

This had been proved when an investigator visited China, where he posed as a potential importer. When he told a Chinese government official who accompanied him that items labelled 'cat' might cause offence in the West, the mandarin smiled.

"This is China," he replied, "we don't worry about things like that. We'll use whatever label you want.' He then trotted out a list of wellused bogus names such as ' Mongolian dog' and 'China wolf'.

In the cynical, heartless and ruthlessly exploitative secret world of the cat and dog fur traders, such tactics are wearily routine, as the Daily Mail/Humane Society investigation discovered.

Cat farms operating across the Channel

Although at least one cat farm appears to be operating just across the Channel, the vast majority of pelts are collected in the Far East, where there are scores of smallholdings keeping anything from a handful of cats or dogs to several hundred.

Because they are good-natured, easily-bred and need comparatively little food and husbandry, cats are particularly popular.

They are crammed into small bamboo cages and kept until their pelts are luxuriant and full-sized.

They are then executed in a horrific manner: lassooed with a noose slipped through the cage bars and around their necks, then hoisted, meowing and wriggling, until they fall silent. In this way, the pelts - the only thing that concerns their keepers - are not damaged.

In one farm, a two-hour flight from Beijing, investigators filmed more than a dozen cats being garrotted in this way until finally only one was left. Frozen with terror after witnessing the death of his companions, he bobbed and weaved his head in a frantic - but vain - effort to avoid the noose.

At another farm, in the Philippines, two caged cats were shown hugging one another in the apparent knowledge that they were about to die.

"They had seen 20 other cats pulled up and hanged," says Rick Swain, the Humane Society's chief investigator, who recently exposed the scandal of lamb foetus coats (like the one worn by Madonna) and has led the global pet fur inquiry.

"It's hard to believe that they didn't know what was happening, given the way they behaved.

"They were full-grown cats and they actually had their paws around one another. They were staring at the hidden camera absolutely petrified.

"These weren't farmed cats, they were strays picked up by rustlers. One had a heart-shaped collar so we know it was a family pet."

Farmed dogs are killed with similarly efficient brutality. Usually they are strung up by the legs, then an artery in the thigh is cut so that they bleed to death. Again, this avoids damage to their coats.

The profits are vast. Impoverished and ignorant farmers will sell their pelts to the tanneries for perhaps £1 or £1.50 each. By the time they are sold in Europe they can fetch 20 or 30 times that amount.

In one fashionable fur shop, in a small Flemish market town near Antwerp, we were offered a Chinese green-tabby cat coat for almost £2,000.

We were offered a 12-skin blanket for £220 although some high quality ones made with up to 80 skins

Source: MailOnSunday