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The Danish government has abandoned an attempt to pass emergency legislation allowing it to cull all the minks in the country.
Last Wednesday, Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen said that all of the country’s mink would be euthanized due to fears that a Covid-19 mutation that passes from mink to humans could jeopardize future vaccines.
But opposition to the measure quickly emerged. “Great doubts about whether this sacrifice has an adequate scientific basis [have] come out now, ”said Jakob Ellemann-Jensen, leader of Denmark’s largest opposition party, Venstre. “At the same time, the government is taking the livelihoods of large numbers of people without actually having the legal rights to do so.”
Frederik Waage, a law professor at the University of Southern Denmark, told the Danish national newspaper Berlingske that the removal order was “illegal”.
Opposition to the slaughter centers on the fact that Denmark’s public health agency, the Statens Serum Institut (SSI), had found no evidence of the mutated strain for more than a month, while several Danish and international experts questioned whether the mutation was dangerous.
In neighboring Sweden, 10 mink farms have been identified with outbreaks of Covid-19. There is no official tally of how many mink farms there are in Sweden, but Benny Andersson, executive director of the Swedish animal rights organization Djurens Rätt, puts the number between 35 and 40.
Andersson does not expect any sacrifice in Sweden. “That is mainly because the ongoing skinning season means that most animals, in addition to breeding stock, are already being slaughtered,” he said.
However, Andersson believes that a cull is the safest option for public health and animal welfare. “This is a small sector, we could easily live without it, given the risk of compromising a vaccine. We should close the mink farms and euthanize all the animals. Sick animals are not being treated, which is another mink welfare problem, ”he said.
Poland and Finland are reported to be Covid-19 free on mink farms, while in the Netherlands fur farming will effectively end this year. In Ireland, a small player in the mink sector, it is reported that trials have already started on all three farms in the country.
In the US, a presentation from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention last week said 11 mink farms had Covid-19 outbreaks. The most recent list on the US Department of Agriculture’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service website shows outbreaks on mink farms in Utah, Wisconsin and Michigan.
The American Veterinary Medical Association said that at least 8,000 minks died from infection with Sars-CoV-2 on farms in Utah. And nearly 3,400 mink are reported to have died from the coronavirus at a mink farm in Wisconsin. He added that the infection appears to be deadliest among older minks.
A statement by the US veterinary NGO Humane Society Veterinary Medical Association said the apparent rapid mutation of the virus in mink, and the lack of a cull, was both a risk to public health and well-being.
He said the result is that “minks, already stressed by unnatural living conditions, experience severe respiratory distress before dying.”
Joanna Swabe, policy advisor for Humane Society International, agreed: “If minks on a farm become infected, suffer respiratory problems and are not culled, their well-being will also be seriously compromised.”
Swabe said that failing to cull on farms where Covid-19 has been detected in mink meant the continued existence of “a group of non-essential animals that could pose a public health risk.
He added: “So far, it is fortunate that we are talking about minks instead of edible animals. Covid-19 can mutate into mink, which a virus can do anyway, and then it can potentially come back to us. What if we contract a zoonotic disease that affects pigs in the next pandemic? Or chickens? Mink can be easily discarded, it is not essential. It’s going to be harder to do that with edible animals. “
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