Norway To Shut Down Fox And Mink Fur Farms By 2025

• Thomas Nelson
• December 21, 2020
• Animals
• 0 Comments

On June 13th, 2019, the Norwegian Parliament voted to ban fox and mink fur farming by 2025, passing the Fur Farming Prohibition Act. The ban will go into effect in February of 2025. Following that vote, they became the 14th European nation to make such a move.

The Norwegian Animal Protection Alliance welcomed this news following 20 years of campaigning to end the practice of fur farming. Norway moved ahead with the fur ban due to concerns about the quality of life for the animals.

Their reasoning? Mink and foxes are carnivores with needs that can’t be met in captivity. Foxes live in family groups while mink are more solitary animals. Proper accommodations weren’t being made for either animal.

Humane Society International’s European branch also expressed appreciation for the decision.

“We are thrilled to see such an unequivocal pledge from the Norwegian government to ban all fur farming,” Ruud Tombrock, executive director of Humane Society International’s Europe branch, said of the ban.

“We also hope that Norway’s fur farmers will decide to dismantle their businesses before the phase out deadline. Factory farming wild animals for fur in appallingly deprived conditions is unconscionably cruel, so to see a ban on this dreadful trade in a Scandinavian country is truly historic.”

Norway won’t be leaving fur farmers out in the cold, however. 170 of the nation’s fur farmers will receive compensation from the state for losses while they transition into other industries. Farmers are already able to apply for economic compensation.

Early in the 20th century, Norway was the world’s largest producer of fox fur with almost 20,000 farms. Today, there are only 170 farms providing only 3 percent of the world’s fox fur.

“It’s not a very lucrative business in Norway,” Sveinung Fjose, of Menon Business Economics and an expert on fur farms, said. “It wouldn’t harm the Norwegian economy severely” to close it down.

Fur farming is at times a savage industry, as all animal agriculture can be. In 2018, Animal Defenders International released grizzly footage of a Polish fur farm dragging Arctic foxes from their cages and electrocuting them to death. The footage is not easy to watch.

Read next: Poland may ban fur farming in 2021