Except that you put pressure on the market - you create demand and lower the existing amount of fur available. Depending on the purchase trends, you would likely cause more animals to be killed to replace your item in the market.

This is similar to the market arguments surrounding ivory products. A logical case can be made not even to sell fossilized mastodon ivory because the market structure and demand mechanisms are furthered, affecting living species eventually. This is NOT the same as recycling sheet vinyl materials, because the goal is to encourage recycling that is closed loop (not downcycled) and the material would otherwise go to a landfill, so the net effect is to reduce consumption of new materials.

My personal feeling about furs is that only persons who have skinned a dead animal by hand, using nothing more than rubber gloves and a sharp knife, should be entitled to wear them. That kind of brings the reality home and forces and intellectually honest decision. What's one animal to sacrifice for the greater good of perhaps hundreds?

Agreed Ben, it would also create a fashion statement to see someone walking around in fur, the more people that do it, even if it's from recycled sources, the more that fur in general will be percieved as acceptable. You'd still be wearing the skin of another animal.

I don't know..

I'd still feel funny about it - especially given that I live in Southern California and can't really justify wearing anything warmer than a heavy sweater during the winter.

ben and john are absolutely right.

personally, i don't even think this news item should have found it's way onto treehugger.

Here in New Zealand, possums (introduced by human immigrants) are a huge problem - they kill a lot of native birds (most of which are endangered or already extinct) and also cause massive damage to plantlife. Some of the possums killed by farmers or the government's pest control programs can contribute to making fur products like souvenir items, clothing, etc. My point is - wearing fur in and of itself isn't necessarily 'bad', it really depends on the circumstances via which it was obtained...

These days most of the stuff made with fur in Europe is using tainted rabbit fur. The fur used is a byproduct of the rabbits grown for food.

Domestic rabitt and possum fur make sense as commercial product. Wild animals that are endangered in large portions of their native ranges should not be sold in clothing however. That's a braight line that most would agree with.

I have always felt that NOT wearing a fur product that has ALREADY been bought and purchased (by whomever - the person who donated it to the 2nd hand clothing store, a grandmother...)further disrespects the animal that was sacrificed for the fur. At least let the animal's death be of some use in the form of warmth. I am troubled, however, by re-using the fur as decoration...

If nothing else, these products will force us to suspend our judgements of others. When we see a fur-wearer we will have to question our impulse to judge them as a contributor to the exploitation of animals for fur...because they just might be a recycler!

You can say all you want about fur, how it's bad, how you torture animals, place them in pens, living their lives in a small, dingy, little, dirty cage and such. But hell, I'm sure you probably own a something leather be it a wallet, bag, jacket or shoes. It would be probably plausible to say that it would be impossible to find anyone who has never owned anything leather. They get skinned too. Hell, you eat them. That way, no one's better than the rest, fur or no fur.

April: yes, I know 99.99..% of us have owned leather. But we change. And fur is not the same. Fur is treating animals like they have absolutely no feelings, by beating them to death in order to preserve their fur. I could never wear fur. Just seeing it makes me nauseous.

I could never wear fur, new or recycled. Wearing the corpse of a dead animal is not glamorous, and should never have been treated as if it was. Who would know that the specific fur you're wearing was recycled, and if designers see that fur is back in style they'll start including more fur in their line, causing the death of more animals.

Sharon, say you die, would you like to be burried or have someone flaunt your skin around on their back or around thier neck. It's totally dirsrespectful, and sick.

You know first of all:fashion is just something useless that gets boring after a while and has no meaning any way. sometimes it makes you weak and makes you feel puny infront of peer pressure. which ,by the way, will prevent you from being outspoken about anything you want to wear to feel comfortable (and i'm not talking about the ppl who might wear something outspoken just to show-off) . 2nd of all innocent animals shouldn't be killed because of something as useless, boring and foolish as fashion.