- BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. (AP) - Fur coats in the fancy shops on Rodeo Drive may
soon come with a warning label with gruesome details of how the fur's original
wearers - the animals - were killed.
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- Thanks to a petition drive by animal
rights activists, citizens of this mecca of luxury shopping will get the
chance May 11 to vote on a referendum requiring furriers to tag their products.
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- ''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 tag would read.
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- A reluctant City Council voted 3-1 Tuesday,
with one abstention, to call the initiative election. Mayor Les Bronte
was the lone dissenting vote.
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- ''I don't want our police officers going
to stores and checking the linings of coats,'' Bronte said. ''We don't
need a pelt posse here.''
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- A group called Beverly Hills Consumers
for Informed Choices collected the signatures of more than 3,300 registered
voters, forcing the council to put the measure on the ballot. Supporters
believe it would be the first fur warning of its kind in the country.
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- The group says most furriers tell buyers
that the animals are killed by injection, which isn't always the case.
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- Wayne Pacelle, a senior vice president
of the Humane Society of the United States, supports the proposed law.
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- ''Fur is purely a status symbol, and
more and more it is a symbol of cruelty,'' he said. ''Beverly Hills has
a warm climate. The only reason why people would want to wear fur is for
the status.''
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- The proposed law doesn't take into account
that there are no laws regulating the killing of animals for their fur,
countered Teresa Platt, executive director of Fur Commission USA, an association
representing mink and fox farmers.
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- ''For mink, the preferred method is gas,
and for fox it's injection, but occasionally it is something different,''
she said.
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- The proposed tag ''lists a variety of
methods by which the animals may or may not have been put down,'' she added.
''Imagine if such a label were required for meat, chicken, fish, medicine
- the list is endless.''
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- For William Carothers, of Santa Barbara,
who was looking for a fox-trimmed leather coat at Somper Furs for his wife
for Valentine's Day, said the tag wouldn't affect his decision.
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- ''I love animals myself, but fur has
been worn forever,'' he said. ''I learned long ago that Bambi no longer
runs in the wild.''
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- The manager of Somper Furs, Douglas Fine,
called the ballot measure ''one more attempt by the extreme animal activists
to generate publicity to hurt the fur industry.''
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