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They are stacked one on top of the other. White, black and gray. They are lifeless, thrown away like garbage bags. However, even in this dramatic scene, her beauty ironically does not fail. Its soft coat, quality and death sentence after a hellish life, is in front of our eyes. It looks even softer because those animals have no life. The images of the massacre of minks on Danish farms go around the world and tear the heart. That heart that the Danish prime minister said had no “light” when deciding to kill 17 million copies. All that are kept on the hundreds of farms in a Denmark that is the world’s leading “producer” of mink fur. Already that word is atrocious: “producer” how man actually produced something, while instead confining millions of animals in small cages just long enough to reach a useful size to be slaughtered and skinned. Because that soft fur can adorn clothing or other accessories that humans wear. They are called “intensive” farms because it is the logic of the market that dictates: the minimum spaces are calculated so that as many animals as possible can be raised to maximize profit. At least this was once, whereas now it seems to reduce the cost of production and make these final “products” accessible to the consumer at even low prices.
It is not a speech about animal rights. That is another aspect, almost taken for granted, although some continue to question that animals do not feel emotions, some even say that they do not feel pain. As if the deprivation of liberty alone was not a pain in itself. However, in these times of coronavirus, we have experienced firsthand what it means to be confined to a confined space. On farms, extreme deprivation conditions cause such stress levels to arise in animals that they induce self-mutilation. Episodes of infanticide, aggression and cannibalism have been on the agenda for some time reported by animal welfare organizations.
It is not a discourse on animal rights: because if it were, it must be remembered that for one meter of fur, about 60 minks lose their lives. And at least many haute couture houses are banning them, but those accessible to “mere mortals” will remain.
But the real human defeat in the slaughter of minks is the terrible mistake of intensive agriculture. Now in Denmark a mutation of the coronavirus that is transmitted to humans has been discovered and that could, I emphasize that it could, reduce the effectiveness of a possible vaccine to combat Covid-19. The conditional is essential because for now the only certainty is that the virus did not start from the mink, but from the man who transmitted it to the animal that has become his impeccable vehicle.
The solution is ready immediately: take 17 million minks, remove them from their cages amid desperate screams and kill them by suffocating them with harmful substances. There are 17 million living things that might not even have existed if man had not decided to “produce” skins. Because nature, or mother nature as we should all call her, would have managed to establish a balance as she usually does and would have said that there would be no place for everyone.
Mink today, but tomorrow the threat, as in the past, is called African swine fever of which outbreaks have been discovered in Germany in recent days but which in 2018 registered catastrophic figures in China: two years ago it was calculated that El 15 percent of farmed pigs around the world have died from the African virus or died to stop its spread. In China alone, that percentage has risen to 50 percent of the 440 million specimens. To make a comparison, it is as if the Italian population was exterminated four times. But in this case the news is more the price of pork that in the populous Asian country has skyrocketed, more than the extermination of all those animals. Because, experts say, African swine fever is only transmitted between pigs and wild boars, not humans.
Even before that, it was bird flu that wreaked havoc: in recent years this virus has affected 10 countries around the world, killing or killing some 50 million birds.
However, supporters of intensive agriculture explain that sanitary controls are very strict. But it is precisely the idea of herding thousands of animals in a few spaces that is the true defeat of humanity. You are violating the basic rules of mother nature. Because then the solution is a massacre where the only calculation that is made is how much to compensate the farmer. In 2020, man should drastically rethink his relationship with nature because the desperate screams of those minks taken from their cages to be killed should not be a background noise of human error. Because one day a virus could hit man, many times by his own mistake, and not find a scientific solution. So what would be the solution? The extermination of infected humans.
Man should remember that on this Earth we are tenants, not owners. That we share it with other living beings that, although considered (erroneously) inferior to man, have maintained the instinct of conservation for future generations. While we discuss whether or not wearing the mask is a violation of individual freedom, regardless of the fact that our well-being is derived from that of those in front of us.
That is why the massacre taking place in Denmark is a defeat for humanity.
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