Pity The Poor Rats

This is really kind of sad. The Daily Mail has a real sob sister piece, masquerading as real news. They basically reprint a PETA press release as straight news. It's a complaint about the treatment of chinchillas, such as the ones that were used to make a coat that Madonna was seen wearing.

Stuck in the dingy concrete barn of a farm in Michigan, rows of tiny cages are stacked four high against the walls. Behind the bars of the cages are hundreds of chinchillas, furry rodents originally from South America that are popular as household pets.

But these animals, as reported by an undercover animal rights campaigner, are not being reared as pets - they are being farmed for their fur.

They will be killed by electrocution before being skinned and their fur sold to fashion chains to make coats, such as the one that Madonna was seen in this week.

A coat such as hers can sell for £35,000 and take up to 60 chinchilla pelts to make. But at what cost?

Even by the standards of the fur-farming business, the treatment of the chinchillas is particularly cruel, according to an investigator from People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (Peta).

Its researcher managed to get access to the chinchilla farm in Michigan (much commercial chinchilla fur comes from America), and they claimed the animals are kept in 'breeder' rooms where mothers are separated from their babies which are taken away to 'growing' rooms.

Inadequate diet, rough handling and neglect mean that the natural death rate among the caged animals is high. One in three generally perish before they are killed for their fur.

Any chinchilla which has chewed its fur - a sign of stress - and has thus made its pelt unsuitable, is moved from the main row of cages into a lower rack, known as 'Death Row'.

There, the Peta investigator watched as the farmer sat in a wheeled office chair and moved along the row, reaching into the cages and killing the animals by wringing their necks. He would then throw the still twitching animal on the floor. "I don't feel a thing," he said, 'I could do this all day.'

Love the way they work in the "popular as pets" thing. And the, "I don't feel a thing" remark. (Which is actually the exact same thing Markos "Kos"  Zuniga said about some human being. Isn't that odd?) But anyway, the PETA people have moved back to warm-blooded vermin this time, instead of cockroaches. Of course, they might want to look in a mirror before damning others for the same thing they do. Only worse.

Police in Ahoskie, North Carolina arrested Cook and Hinkle on June 15, 2005 near a shopping-center dumpster, from which they recovered 18 dead pets in trash bags. Thirteen additional dead animals were recovered from the PETA-owned van in which they were traveling. Witnesses from the Bertie County (NC) Animal Shelter and the Ahoskie Animal Hospital later confirmed that the two PETA employees had collected animals earlier that day — including puppies and kittens — on the promise that PETA would find them adoptive homes.

It's sad that the Daily Mail doesn't bother to screen out the press release crud and consider the source.