<http://schema.org/articleBody>
"  I am a small, slender woman with such low blood pressure that nurses joke I must be dead, and a circulation that correspondingly never quite reaches my fingers and toes. From early October to late April I am continuously cold. So on New Jersey days when the temperature drops below freezing, I open my closet, look at the fur coat my grandmother bought for me 27 years ago, and ask myself whether I feel like getting into a bunch of discussions about my outerwear today. If I don&amp;#039;t (usually the case) I close the closet and venture out layered and wrapped as well as I can manage. If I&amp;#039;m up for the Conversation, I put on my fur. I was hesitant when my grandmother offered this gift. I was 23, and a fur seemed like an excessively costly and adult possession. But my always impeccably appareled grandmother had a way of enforcing her will when it came to such matters. So off we went to the fur salon, where I ended up with a very &amp;#039;80s fur: a wide-shouldered, thickly shaggy beaver that nearly swallowed me up. Its long, silky hairs evoked an intensely tactile memory of the fur throw my parents kept on their bed; as a child, I&amp;#039;d loved to stroke it and wrap myself up in it. The coat was heavenly warm, much warmer than the down coats I&amp;#039;d spent my childhood huddled in. I loved it. But I didn&amp;#039;t wear it. Even though I was living in Connecticut, where the winters could grow brutal, I didn&amp;#039;t know anyone my age who owned a fur. I was an editorial assistant at a magazine\u2014would my bosses cut my already meager salary when they saw the coat? Besides, the mid-&amp;#039;80s was not a great time to wear fur. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) had begun to draw attention to the suffering of animals raised or trapped for fur, and radical animal-rights activists were throwing red paint on those who dared to ignore the message. At the least, wearing fur could garner you some very dirty looks. I believed I should feel guilty about the coat, but I wasn&amp;#039;t sure if I really did. There were people in my family who made a living as furriers\u2014the fur salon I&amp;#039;d gone to was owned by one of them. Plus, the coat felt good and served a practical purpose. But in the end the fear of disapprobation was enough to keep me and my coat from venturing out in public together. Two years later, I was working in New York City at Glamour magazine. Let me repeat: I was working at a place called Glamour. And in the eight years I spent there, I hardly remember a single employee, of high status or low, who wore a fur coat to our office. Besides me. Because by then I sometimes did. My daily exercise was to walk from my apartment on the Upper West Side to work in midtown, and if the weather dipped into the low twenties, the fur was the only way I could manage it. I&amp;#039;d skulk in, drape the coat over the couch near my cubicle, and alternately worry that it would be stolen or that someone would throw a rotten egg at it when I headed home. The fur industry has grown since the &amp;#039;80s\u2014in 2012, it generated $1.27 billion in U.S. sales\u2014but I can&amp;#039;t figure out where all that fur is going: into linings, where you can&amp;#039;t see it? I&amp;#039;m still almost always the only figure I see in a fur on the streets of my suburb on a frigid day. A friend of mine inherited her grandmother&amp;#039;s mink when she was in her twenties, and although she says it&amp;#039;s gorgeous and toasty, she&amp;#039;s worn it only once, to a New Year&amp;#039;s party two decades ago. She worries it might make her seem insensitive and gauche. In truth she loves the coat so much that she sometimes stops to admire it in her front hall closet. &amp;quot;I want to wear it,&amp;quot; she says, &amp;quot;but I always stop short.&amp;quot; Another friend (also small boned and easily chilled) was hissed at not long ago by a teenage boy\u2014&amp;quot;Animal killer!&amp;quot;\u2014when she wore her shearling to get groceries. Mostly, though, people have more oblique ways of making their surprise or distaste known. There&amp;#039;s the &amp;quot;Wow, you look fancy!&amp;quot; (read: &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m shocked that you would preen while wearing animal skins on your back&amp;quot;). Or the faux supportive: &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s great that you don&amp;#039;t feel embarrassed about wearing fur!&amp;quot; (read: &amp;quot;How could you not be embarrassed about wearing fur?&amp;quot;). Sometimes, weary of anticipation, I launch into defensive TMI: &amp;quot;I know: this coat! My grandmother bought this coat for me 27 years ago! I told her not to, but she\u2026.&amp;quot; Either way, I cannot avoid the Conversation\u2014the need to explain where I got the coat and why I wear the coat and that I do get that fur can be considered morally compromising, even though I am not usually a bad person.  What intrigues me is that these same friends, if we were meeting for dinner and I ordered, say, veal saltimbocca, would never say, &amp;quot;How great that you don&amp;#039;t feel embarrassed about eating baby cow!&amp;quot; Or, should I be wearing leather boots, &amp;quot;Hmm, very fancy footwear!&amp;quot; I&amp;#039;ve done a bit of research into fur farming, which accounts for 85 percent of the sourcing in the global fur trade, and if even some of PETA&amp;#039;s claims are true\u2014about farmed-fur animals immobilized in tiny cages, then painfully electrocuted or suffocated; about the drawn-out, agonizing death of trapping\u2014there is need for reform. Steps can and should be taken to eradicate conditions that make fur animals suffer. But the public obsession with fur as uniquely immoral puzzles me. The realities associated with the raising, penning, and slaughtering of beef cattle are equally appalling, and the number of animals killed for meat dwarfs that of those killed for fur. In 2012 about 9 billion farm animals were slaughtered by the meat industry in the U.S. alone; the number for fur animals is 50 million worldwide. One fur coat can be worn for generations, while a steak is consumed in half an hour. I know these facts don&amp;#039;t make fur morally stainless, but I have to wonder why the revulsion is so much more instantaneous when it comes to fur. Needless to say, almost none of the people who comment on my fur wearing eschew meat or leather. I discussed the disconnect with a thoughtful friend recently\u2014we were already on the subject of fur because, you know, she&amp;#039;d noticed that I looked &amp;quot;fancy&amp;quot; when I met her for coffee that frigid day. She thought perhaps it was because of the association of fur with luxury: that ethical outrage is just a cover for resentment of the display of spending power embodied in a fur worn publicly. There may be something to that, although the resentment is illogical. Some furs can be had for a whole lot less than a Burberry trench, and certainly for less than many carnivores spend on meat in a year. It&amp;#039;s hard to claim that meat eating is any less of a luxury than fur when vegetarians prove that one can live quite well, and probably more healthily, without it. I don&amp;#039;t wear fur as a fashion statement. In fact I think I look a bit ridiculous in my coat; someone taller and with broader shoulders would probably pull it off better than I do. I wear fur for its warmth. The garment industry is always coming up with new breakthroughs, and maybe, just maybe, there&amp;#039;s some supersynthetic out there that would keep me as warm as my beaver coat. But that would cost money, perhaps a good bit, and I already own my coat. Isn&amp;#039;t there some small virtue in my reuse-recycle approach? I may not be able to rely on that last notion much longer, however. This past summer, for the first time, I took my fur to be professionally cleaned and stored. It&amp;#039;s the sort of thing my grandmother did on a yearly basis, and it seemed that I might finally be grown-up enough to take the same care with what she&amp;#039;d given me. The furrier pointed out that, after 27 years, some of the skins had dried out and split. He offered to do minor repairs but didn&amp;#039;t advise putting more than a couple hundred dollars into the coat. &amp;quot;You&amp;#039;re going to get two or three more years out of it, tops,&amp;quot; he warned. So there isn&amp;#039;t much time left before I&amp;#039;ll have to put my trusty beaver coat to rest (turn it into a throw for my bed?) and ponder what to do next. Will I spring for a new fur? Or will I decide that it&amp;#039;s time to get to know my acrylic and modacrylic polymers? Those names just don&amp;#039;t have quite the same ring, do they? "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.elle.com/fashion/personal-style/a2498/essay-on-fur-and-animal-rights/>