The air was thick with irony this week. While we spend our Saturdays blowing soap bubbles, hula hooping, pogo sticking, dancing to 80's music, and eating cookies in front of Schumacher Furs, Gregg Schumacher and his friends continue to refer to us as "terrorists" - look out Al Qaeda, if dancing to disco music is now considered a terrorist activity, we're all-stars. This week was especially rich as one of Schumacher's supporters knocked down a small female protester and was then led off in handcuffs. The real bullies reveal themselves.
A Schumacher supporter walked out of the store and started an unprovoked conflict with a mentally handicapped protester. As the protester tried to get away from the man, one of the radical cheerleaders (who is probably half his weight) stood in front to protect the protester. The man violently shoved her to the ground and continued to pursue the activist. Three police officers, who witnessed this event from across the street, ran over, pressed him against the building, and cuffed him. They arrested the man and charged him with misdemeanor harassment and disorderly conduct. We continued our protest.
The fur industry is full of cruelty and violence, no matter what expensive and stylized product results. The image of furriers is carefully constructed to draw attention away from the brutality of how fur is obtained, from using pictures of smiling models and movie stars wearing fur to the free-flowing champagne inside Schumacher. People who walk in the store and say they don't care about what happens to the animals, and furriers who pretend that keeping a wild animal in a steel-jaw leghold trap for up to a week or in a small barren cage for life is "humane," have not evolved with those who value sentient life beyond how we can use it for profit and fashion. It's no wonder that people so callously cut-off from the experience of others might throw a punch at another human. One passer-by this week who said he supported Schumacher laughed when he heard about anal electrocution and saw our video of desperately sick and neglected caged foxes, starving, cannibalized, showing exposed bone - but still valuable for their fur. Fortunately, the majority of passers-by give us support and encouragement. We know that Portland is an animal-friendly city.
We also heard from a woman who reported that she received one of our fliers and then went to furisdead.com and learned about the fur industry, including seeing the video of a raccoon dog beaten and then skinned alive. She said she then went to her closet and got rid of her pair of fur-lined boots, she was so disgusted with the cruelty of the fur industry. See  http://www.furisdead.com and http://www.furkills.org for videos and information about the fur industry.
After a several year period of using faux fur, the British Ministry of Defense has decided to go back to using real bear fur for the British Guards' hats. They will spend an average of 650 pounds per bearskin, and contribute to the slaughter of 10,000 Canadian black bears. The fur of female bears is particularly prized because of its glossiness and thickness, and it is estimated that for every bear killed, another 2-3 die, because many of the bears are mothers with young cubs who cannot fend for themselves. Unknown numbers of bears die painfully from botched kills. For a country that has banned fox hunting and fur farming, using the fur from wild animals for show hats is odd. But it's not unusual to import cruelty while paying lip-service to opposing it; the majority of commercial fur comes from China (including fur at Schumacher), where it is documented that dogs and cats are packed into tiny crates, stacked by the thousands on trucks, and then electrocuted, strangled, and sometimes skinned alive. Their fur is unlabeled or mislabeled and sold in the US. How many who profess to love dogs and cats support the fur industry?
Please join us each Saturday from 12:30-5:00 in front of Schumacher Furs (811 SW Morrison). And feel free to protest there on other days of the week as well.
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