Idaho Couple May Lose Home Over Mink Farm

According to a story this week in the Idaho State Journal, a couple in Idaho may be forced to lose their home over the Ball Brothers mink farm. “They moved in on us and they have more or less bankrupted us”. In 2007, construction began on the farm, after the Ball brothers made plans to move their fur farm from Morgan, Utah to Malad, Idaho. The farm is estimated to imprison 20,000 mink. Neighbors of the farm fought in court to block the construction of the farm, but ultimately lost. Now two of the neighbors – Bob and Bev Reudter – have had their hours devalued to the point they move lose the property. The couple says that because of the smell of the mink farm, family no longer visits them and friends will not come over. The couple says they can’t cook outside because of the smell and number of flies. “We have flies, not by the hundreds, but by the thousands,” Bev said. “You wake up in the morning and you have to kill flies. You start breakfast, you have to make sure the flies stay off of the breakfast. You leave even a cereal bowl down and it’s (quickly) full of flies.” The Reudter’s gave this admonishment to anyone in a neighborhood where a fur farm might move in: “We just want people to be aware that if they get news there is a mink farm going to go in, to fight, fight, fight, because it’s awful. It’s dropped our quality of life to almost nothing.” This is the full article: MALAD — When a mink farm sought to locate on property adjacent to Bob and Bev Reudter’s rural Malad home five years ago, they and several of their neighbors fought against it to no avail. After nearly five years of living next to the mink farm, which Bev says has robbed the couple of any quality of life, the Reudters are also in a dire financial situation they currently see no escape from. “They moved in on us and they have more or less bankrupted us,” Bev said. “There is $3,000 between us and nothing. Our financial situation is $3,000....

Science Journal Concludes Mink on Fur Farms Suffer

The reputed science journal Nature published a 2001 article on the suffering of fur farmed mink. The article concludes that mink kept in cages suffer from lack of access to water the same way they suffer from lack of access to other necessities, such as food. Some quotes from the article: “Our results indicate that fur-farmed mink are still motivated to perform the same activities as their wild counterparts, despite being bred in captivity for 70 generations”. “…in the wild (mink) would patrol territories 1–4 km long, use several nest sites, and hunt by following scent trails, investigating burrows, and diving and swimming for aquatic prey.” “The high level of stress experienced by mink denied access to the pool, rated as the most valuable resource, is evidenced by an increase in cortisol production indistinguishable from that caused by food deprivation. These results suggest that caging mink on fur farms does cause the animals frustration, mainly because they are prevented from swimming.” Despite arguments that mink housed in fur farms have successfully adapted to captivity, these animals may suffer by being deprived of resources that exist in the wild.” Frustrations of Fur-farmed...

Son of Utah Fur Farming Family Tells His Story

“But the unspeakable misery of their animals cannot be denied.” The Beckstead family is one of the biggest fur farming families in Utah and Idaho. They are said to own two farms, one in each state. One of the Beckstead clan does not support the bloody work of his family. In 2001, son Scott Beckstead published this damning indictment of his family and the fur farming business. The article was published in The Oregonian (the largest newspaper in Oregon), The Oregonian December 9, 2001 Misery on the Mink Farm by Scott Beckstead These cold, gray days stir vivid memories for me, childhood images I shall live with forever. Strongest among them are those of pelting season on Grandpa’s mink farm. My grandfather, gone now for more than a decade, raised minks in Franklin, Idaho. Every fall, my family traveled to Franklin to help my grandparents with what we called “the pelting season.” I remember the smell. Like all members of the weasel family, minks are equipped with powerful scent glands. They sprayed their musky stench while in the throes of death. That smell permeated everything. Our clothes. Our hair. I didn’t have the manual dexterity to do the skinning, so I helped with the killing. We killed the females by breaking their necks. The males were not so lucky. They were too big to have their necks broken, so they were gassed. It took them a long time to die. I remember hearing their gasps and screams, and I remember having to pry their jaws from the wire mesh once they went silent. After they were killed, I piled their warm, soft bodies into a wheelbarrow. I wheeled them to the mink shed just outside the pelting shed and positioned their bodies so as they stiffened, they would be easier to skin. I remember how the minks within eyesight or earshot reacted to the cries of their dying mates, how by the hundreds they bobbed and paced frantically inside their tiny pens. One mink, a beautiful smoky gray female, died as she was pulled from her pen. She screamed, and then simply went limp. In the preceding hours, she had watched and listened as...

List of NAFA Wild Fur Receiving Depots

CAFF has obtained a list “wild fur receiving depots” in the United States. This list is provided to trappers and provides them with contact info for people who will take their dead animals and send them to North American Fur Auction (NAFA). The people and businesses on this list function as middlemen between the trappers and NAFA. View the list of wild fur receiving depots here. NAFA Fur Trapper Receiving...

Read Employee Newsletter from Fur Farm Supplier United Vaccines

We were very excited to obtain a copy of the the United Vaccines employees-only newsletter. However, we found the newsletter, titled “United InFURmation”, to be incredibly disappointing and banal. The newsletter includes: *Fourth of July safety tips. *Word puzzles. *How to properly shop for a fur coat. …and more similarly uninspired filler. Still, it is a rare piece of documentation from inside a very important company, and we hope you are able to extract something of value from it (we failed to). Read a PDF of the United Vaccines newsletter here.United Vaccines Newsletter This is the United Vaccines mission statement, from the newsletter: “It takes quality people to manufacture a quality product. At United Vaccines, Inc., it is our mission to incorporate quality into eve rything we do; from superior staffing to excellence in manufacturing and testing, it is the extra steps that we take that ensure that every dose of vaccine shipped out of our plant is the best in the...