My father, Jack Herscovici, visiting me at the 2002 NAFFEM, the wonderful high-end North American fur show run for the benefit of the whole trade by the Canadian fur manufacturers association (CFTDI) in Montreal for 30 years, until 2013. My father was a member of the show committee for many years in the early days of the Montreal fur show. NAFFEM morphed into StyleLab-Montreal in 2014. - Alan Herscovici

Jeff Mitchell owns a 150-acre mixed farm with mink in Norwich, Ontario. The farm was started in 1949 by his father with just four female mink and one male. It’s grown to 3,200 females today, producing 13,000 mink a year. “Ever since I was a small child, I’ve always been involved with the mink,” says Jeff. Several family members help out on the farm, plus local hires. “I live in a rural community, and if I can create employment for someone … I’m really glad to do it because that brings a job into our community, and we try to keep our people busy at home first.” Jeff enjoys the challenges brought by running a mixed farm. “Looking after the cattle is a different part of my life, something different to learn about, to watch and to grow. Each phase of agriculture is different, and we all have different ways of doing what we do.” He points at a neighbor’s field with cattle, horses and sheep all together. “Some of us have gone way forward in how we separated and specialized in everything, and some places life hasn’t changed near as much as everybody thinks it has.” Jeff’s mink live on a diet of 85% meat blended with cereal with vitamins and minerals to make a completely balanced diet. By-products used include fish heads, beef tripe, and livers and kidneys. These body organs “are all the parts of the animal that the wild animal goes for first, after it’s made a kill,” says Jeff. “In fact, the mink probably have a lot better diet than a lot of people in our society today.” He also believes his mink are better off than wild mink. “They probably have a lot better diet, on a regular basis, than they ever would in the wild. They’re not out fighting, they’re not running miles looking for their food. They have food on a regular basis, fresh water, a clean dry nest, and they’re monitored to be able to survive because if they don’t survive, we don’t survive.” In the fall, after the mink are harvested, the fat on the carcasses is rendered into biodiesel and the rest is composted along with the manure and used bedding. It is then “returned directly to the land as manure to furnish next year’s crops,” explains Jeff, “which grow exceptionally well on my farm because of said manure.”

In this visit to a tanning plant, we follow the process of transforming raw beaver pelts into a material ready for garment designers. First a worker sorts through the raw pelts to determine the type of garment they’re suitable for, and then hammers a lot number into the underside of each pelt. He then cuts out the ear cartilage. The pelts are dry because of preservation techniques used before they were delivered to the tanning plant, so they are rehydrated using chemical washes, including tanning chemicals. These convert the underside of the skins to supple leather that will allow them to be shaped into garments. All the washes cause the pelts to thicken, so they are thinned down using a flesher’s knife. This is a skilled process. One false move and you’ll cut into the follicles and lose fur. Next, the pelts are placed in a rotating drum of sawdust and mineral solution to clean and condition the leather. The furs emerge still damp, so they are hung over wooden dowels, leather side up. Now, a worker scrapes off the long hair to expose the downy undercoat, which has the most desirable look and texture. A generous amount of oil is rubbed onto the leather to lubricate it, and the pelts are then tossed into a “kicker box” which causes the oil to penetrate the skin. Next, a spinning metal wheel tugs at the pelt to stretch it. That done, a worker cuts away the edges, and it’s into the hot press. This irons and adds luster to the fur. After a quick brush, the pelts get one more press. Then a shearing machine cuts the hairs to an even length. And the pelts are ready for their trip to the garment factory!

WatchMojo.com interviews Alan Herscovici, senior researcher at Truth About Fur, and executive vice-president of the Fur Council of Canada from 1997 to 2016. Did you know that wearing fur can be good for the environment? Edited highlights follow. Alan Herscovici: Some of the activist groups today are saying, “We don’t need fur. We have all these great synthetics,” but most synthetics are made from petrochemicals. They are non-renewable resources, there’s pollution problems and so on. So fur really has a role to play. It’s been around a long time. It’s proven. It has a track record. So here we are, 400 years after the commercial fur trade started in Canada. The biologists tell us that the beaver are as abundant as they were when Europeans first came. That’s quite an environmental success story. WatchMojo: What do you have to say to people who believe that fur is unethical? AH: We shouldn’t kill animals for frivolous purposes, and some activists are saying a fur coat is a frivolous purpose. But we do have to wear something. We do wear winter clothing. When you think of fur as being a natural product, such a long-lasting product, that we can remodel it and restyle it, it can be passed down and worn vintage, it’s anything but frivolous. And it’s not at all frivolous for the people who live on the land. The Cree of James Bay eat beaver and muskrat. They hunt them for food. They don’t have cows up there. When they’ve eaten the meat, should they throw the fur away? WatchMojo: You started an initiative called FurIsGreen.com. Can you tell us about that? AH: People are ready to hear another side of the story. The [fur] trade is so artisanal, a handicraft heritage industry, and that’s why we haven’t heard the other side. When you attack a big modern industry, they give it to some PR department. The reason you haven’t heard the other side of the fur story is because they’re not communicators. It’s trappers out in the bush. It’s family farms. Everything around us does come from the land, from people who got their hands dirty. Lumberjacks or miners or cattlemen, all these people that are being attacked by these protest campaigns are the people that feed us and clothe us. And there’s something bizarre that we’ve had the privilege that the people on the land have done such a good job that most of us can live in the city and have nice clean fingernails and talk about stuff and call that working. What do we do with that freedom? We turn on the people on the land as if there was something wrong with them, and that’s something we have to change.

Alexandra Suhner Isenberg has been active in the fur trade since 2009 and from 2014 until 2018 was Social Media Manager and then Director of Online Communications at Truth About Fur. A Canadian with a background in fashion, Alexandra developed a passion for fur when she worked as a designer in some of the top luxury fashion houses in Paris and London. She began working in the fur trade when returning to Canada after a decade in Europe. She has lectured about the fur trade and is an advocate of the industry who has visited farms, auction houses, and trade shows across the world. As of 2018, she resides in Sweden, where she runs her own company producing sleepwear. Here she is shown visiting a Finnish fox farm in 2015. "So many people think the fur industry is about glamour and rich people wearing fancy coats," she says. "That's only a tiny part of the industry, and the part that I see is the opposite of that. Visiting a fur farm is usually the opposite of glamorous: here I am at a fox farm in Finland wearing the regulation hazmat suit. These lovely outfits need to be worn by any visitors on the farms, in order to protect the animals from any outside germs."

Marianne Patten farms mink in Glenwood, Nova Scotia. She grew up on a dairy farm, “so agriculture has been intrinsic to my background, brought up with the whole agricultural work ethic, and I always knew I was going to be involved in some aspect of agriculture.” She attended Nova Scotia Agricultural College where she took a degree in animal science. The ranch opened in 2004. As in other places across Canada, agriculture has suffered here. “We used to have 33 dairy farms in this county and now we’re down to three. But what producers are left, we work as a community. I have a number of local beef producers in the area that are taking my manure waste and applying it on their fields to raise hay, so their animals can have a food source. So we are part of a community. If we can work together and help each other out, it becomes a really nice symbiotic relationship.” Like any livestock farmer, Marianne places great importance on animal welfare. “I don’t have a problem with the animals being in a cage,” she says, “providing it’s a proper cage environment in terms of they have access to water, they have access to feed. They have room to do what they want to do – intrinsically what they want to do in terms of running around, stretching, moving, to provide it in cold weather with proper bedding. The animals will tell you whether they’re happy or not. If an animal is constantly portraying injuries or some sort of ill health, you know the environment isn’t good. It’s common sense in some respects.” “I love my job,” says Marianne. “There’s something, even the most mundane or simpler tasks, or even the most frustrating days, you can go home at the end of the day and say I’ve accomplished something. There’s something satisfying, and it’s a hard feeling to explain, about getting up in the morning and providing care and food, water for another being, whether it’s animals or humans. Yes, it does come down to profitability but, as human beings, we have a responsibility if we’re going to undertake especially caring for another human being or an animal, looking after them properly, providing the proper welfare, and understanding their needs, and looking at how you can provide the best quality of food, water, environment for them.”

I've been trapping for the past 3 years with help from my mentor and together we've put together 3 great seasons working the backwoods of Nova Scotia. I don't have a lot of traps to use, so the biggest thing I've learned is how to set a handful of good sets instead of a lot of average ones. Pictured from left to right, my mentor Todd Rafuse and myself Markus Kehoe. Hants County Nova Scotia. - Mark Kehoe

An archival picture of fur buyers at a Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) fur auction held in Montreal in the early 1920's. The auction moved operations to Toronto in 1981. (Photo courtesy of NAFA)

"I have been passionate about art since I was a child. As I was growing up, sewing quickly became way to express my creativity. After a professional career shared between Toronto and Montreal, I worked in the film industry in the costume department for several years. During those years, I always found some time to sew and get creative in my own studio. My field of expertise and biggest interest has been, for as far as I can remember, leather goods. It is precisely because of a leather bag that Christina Nacos, VP of Natural Furs approached me. She had fallen in love with a bag that I was showing in a fair. This is how I joined the Natural Furs family as the specialist of leather accessories and garments." Peter Dawe, leather specialist at Natural Furs International.