A cat much like a sweet, social feline you may know is peacefully sunning herself on a doorstep in China when a stranger grabs her by the scruff of the neck.
She freezes, terrified, then tries to escape—but the stranger's grip is too tight. She's shoved into a cramped wire cage on the back of a truck, packed in so tightly with other abducted cats that she can hardly move.
The truck eventually stops at a crowded, noisy market, and the cages are dropped to the ground without a care for the animals in them. The cats wail in pain and fear, but workers keep throwing and kicking the cages.
Her horrifying ordeal ends with a blow to the head and a knife to the throat before she's strung up and skinned.
Today, cats like this one are being sold and killed at live-animal markets in China—grisly places not unlike the one where the novel coronavirus is believed to have originated. Eyewitnesses have documented as many as 20 cats packed into a single cage—800 or more animals crammed onto a single truck.
From the grisly slaughterhouses in China where these cats will spend their last moments to the massive North American and European fur farms that are themselves petri dishes for future pandemics, animals are often killed for their skin as cheaply and quickly as possible. Some will still show signs of life as their skinless bodies are thrown onto waste piles.
Some companies have been known to mislabel their products deliberately in order to dupe unsuspecting customers. So anyone who still wears fur may very well be wearing the remains of an abused cat.
Every gift—even $2—will get us closer to unlocking our $12,000 #GivingTuesday match.
The only way to prevent animals from suffering in the fur trade is to persuade consumers and designers to stop buying fur and other animal-derived materials—and for four decades, no organization has done more to get people to ditch the skin, fur, and feathers of animals.
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