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The announcement was made by the Prime Minister on November 4 and, less than a week later, it is already happening: there are millions of minks to be slaughtered in Denmark. The decision was made after a mutation of the new coronavirus was found in animals, infecting 214 people. “The mutation of the virus through the mink can create the risk that the future vaccine will not work as it should (…). It is necessary to sacrifice all the minks, ”said Mette Frederiksen, at a press conference.
Reuters visited some mink production farms and photographed the slaughter process, which began immediately after the announcement. The first images were taken on November 6, two days after the decision; this Monday, the news agency captured the mink to be buried in a mass grave located on military land. But in October there were records of animal slaughter, as shown in some images in this photo gallery. The decision has drawn harsh criticism from people in the industry, but also from legislators, who claim that the decision was illegal, which also raised doubts about the scientific evidence that motivated it. The government has already admitted that it had no legal basis for the measure and is rushing to draft a law to support the decision.
This Monday, the Minister of Environment and Food, Mogens Jensen, sent an email to Reuters lamenting the “lack of transparency” in the process. Jensen said the government would move forward with “emergency legislation” to support the slaughter order, although the opposition warned it would not allow a draft to replace what generally results from a 30-day legislative process. On Tuesday, the Danish Food and Veterinary Administration apologized to mink producers in a letter but said it continued to recommend slaughter.
Opposition parties argue that the slaughter of healthy minks should not have started before the compensation plans for workers and owners of the country’s 1,100 farms go into effect. Tage Pederson, head of the Danish association of mink breeders, warned producers to continue with the slaughter, despite doubts about its legality, and warned that the industry, which employs 6,000 people and exports mink fur for value $ 800 million annually – it’s over.
Following this decision, mink, agricultural workers and their families will also be assessed in Poland. However, the population of these animals in Poland must represent only half of the 17 million in Denmark. “The priority is to check the health status of the animals on the farms,” Poland’s agriculture minister said in a statement sent to Reuters. The Polish veterinary authorities reported that they had tests and infrastructure for this control since May, but did not specify what kind of tests had already been carried out, or if they had already been carried out. Some representatives of mink farms claim that tests have actually been carried out, and that they have not shown any covid-19 infection, while others said that the tests had not been carried out. Asked about the tests and possible infections in the mink, the inspection body told the news agency that “there were no identified cases”, without giving further details about the case.
“We all know that this virus does not exist on Polish farms,” said Tadeusz Jakubowski, veterinarian and director of the Polish Association of Breeders and Producers of Fur Animals. “I suspect that someone is using the coronavirus as a pretext to devastate reproduction in Denmark, without a scientific reason,” he shot. The non-governmental organization Otwarte Klatki asked for a normal covid-19 test for the Polish mink: “It is hard to believe that the problem will not appear in Poland sooner or later. Perhaps it already exists, but we do not know,” Pawel said. Rawicki. The country is, together with Denmark and China, one of the world’s leading mink producers. About 60 million die annually in the three countries, estimates the UK’s Humane Society International.
However, Denmark is not the first country to make this decision. In July, the Aragon region, in Spain, decreed the slaughter of almost 100,000 minks, after 80% of these animals were infected with the new coronavirus. The measure was a way to “avoid risks to the population and public health,” justified Joaquín Olona, then Minister of Agriculture of the region. In the same month, but a few weeks earlier, it was the Netherlands that took the same step: some 10,000 were euthanized.
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