“Was caging wild animals before gassing them to death at six months old the best Údarás na Gaeltachta could come up with? Because it beggars belief that we bankrolled this barbaric business, our government in the 1960s offering 15-year tax breaks on top of generous grants to Nordic fur farmers to move here and provide employment in rural areas” - Read Fiona O'Connell’s column in the Sunday Independent...

Being cruel to be kind could be a right measure
November 29 2020

It could be called natural justice that a virus triggered by wildlife abuse has temporarily spared some in this country from what would usually be blood sports season.

This has left the lucky devils just struggling to survive winter in an ever-decreasing habitat - another high-five to humans - and avoiding not just native but alien predators such as mink.

Thankfully, concerns about Covid have signalled a likely end to mink fur farming here after years of debate and delay, reflecting wider steps to ultimately ban the practice in many EU countries.

Yet fur farmers have reacted as if this is breaking news, claiming no one warned them and that it risks the millions of euro they apparently invested over the past decade alone.

You would have had to be confined to one of their acres of doorless sheds of silence, despite them containing thousands of lives, not to have read the writing on the wall.

Certainly, they might be disappointed by scant sympathy for the fact that three families in rural Ireland might lose their livelihoods - all this at a time when four million-plus on this island are also challenged by a world that won't stop changing, forcing us all to adapt or even change career.

But many in their local communities will be sorry to see the fur farms go, having provided jobs for 15 to 20 people at peak season.

They have done nothing but create employment, they say, not bothering anybody.

At which point you might have to remind yourself that Veterinary Ireland, the Irish Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals and animal welfare activists are celebrating the order to cull 120,000 creatures.

And realise that it's one thing to be fond of the folk behind such farms. But another altogether to have no issue with what goes on behind electric fences, as long as you occasionally benefit from it.

Are we so lacking in compassion that we believe the end justifies the means, and sure, they're only animals? An attitude we can no longer afford - not just Covid but climate change and environmental disasters demanding we get the message that we are all connected.

Isn't it time we grew up, got over our self-pity, and put effort into creating employment that doesn't shame us? Was caging wild animals before gassing them to death at six months old the best Údarás na Gaeltachta could come up with?

Because it beggars belief that we bankrolled this barbaric business, our government in the 1960s offering 15-year tax breaks on top of generous grants to Nordic fur farmers to move here and provide employment in rural areas.

But the gravy train on this grisly gift horse has run out.

Time to pack up the gas chambers and the profits from the last 120,000 pelts. And be grateful no one is billing you for damage to biodiversity.

'Lay Of The Land', a collection of Fiona O'Connell's columns, is available in all good bookshops