By Dustin Rhodes

Friends of Animals, since the beginning, has worked to protect fur-bearing animals like coyotes, fox, mink, rabbits, chinchillas and countless others from becoming victims of the fur trade and fashion industries. Our protests and awareness campaigns—such as  Fur Free Friday’s that we helped launch in New York City—have successfully crippled the fur industry and transformed public attitudes about wearing fur, which went from status object to object of ridicule.

Our most iconic anti-fur campaign—poignant and true as ever—features a lynx, a raccoon and coyote all wearing wigs evoking human hair: “You look just as stupid wearing theirs.” And it still rings true: the fur industry and its fickle and trend-following acolytes continue to be stupid and cruel—both factions have blood on their hands.

The war against the fur industry might be animal advocates’ most successful campaign to stop animal exploitation ever, as the industry has slowly and steadily imploded over the last few decades—with designers routinely dropping the use of fur, retailers refusing to sell it and consumers increasingly refusing to buy it.

Some signs of the time: Over 20 countries, mostly in Europe, have banned fur production. London Fashion Week banned fur in 2023, followed by exotic animal skins in 2024. California became the first state to ban new fur sales in 2019. Cities like Ann Arbor, Michigan; Hallandale Beach, Florida; and seven cities in Massachusetts have followed suit. In the past decade, more than 300 retailers and designers have stopped using and/selling fur.

In 2014, the global fur trade killed 140 million foxes, mink and raccoon dogs. By 2023, this number dropped to roughly 20 million, an 85% decline in a single decade, according to the Fur Free Alliance. To make matters worse for the fur industry, in 2023, fur sales plummeted by 40% from the year before.

In the United States, mink pelt production totaled 3,741,150 in 2014, while in 2023 it totaled 973,510 pelts, and that’s down 28% from 2022. Wisconsin is the largest mink producing state, followed by Utah.

There are no credible signs that the real fur trade, and its inherent animal suffering and cruelty is back, even though it’s not completely dead. Yet.

However, for better and/or worse, the look of fur is alive and well, especially as the technology to produce synthetic fur garments has been perfected to the point where it’s hard to tell the difference between faux and the real thing—a confusing problem animal advocates, perhaps, did not anticipate as we all celebrated their creation.

At the same time, vintage clothing is having a moment because consumers are switching to more environmentally friendly, less consumptive buying habits. But it also has undesired consequences: the fur trade is exploiting this shift by promoting the reuse of fur garments.

Most vintage stores—which are wildly popular among Gen Z and Millennials who don’t want to contribute to the growing waste the fashion industry generates yearly—do sell used fur garments. In fact, many of the high end and very popular vintage and second-hand stores, such as The RealReal, have entire sections dedicated to designer fur garments, many of which are in such great condition they look brand new.

There are even entire stores dedicated to selling used fur like VintageFurs—a trendy online store.

In fashion obsessed cities like New York, London and Paris the streets are again filled with real fur from these vintage shops, because consumers are falling into the fur industry’s trap and extolling its allegedly sound ethics. If a fur garment is second-hand, no new animals are being electrocuted, gassed or skinned, they argue that wearing used fur is ethical, good for the planet, and good for animals.

But Friends of Animals believes that’s absurd and untrue. The suffering of the animal killed so long ago is not irrelevant.

Some of our own members contacted us during the winter of 2024/25 to share their surprise and bewilderment about how much fur they were noticing on the streets of New York City and other metropolitan areas—wondering whether there was a resurgence in designers using fur and retailers selling it.

Had attitudes towards fur changed overnight, they wondered? If new fur sales are any indication, thankfully no.

But social media trends that popularize the look of fur will likely continue to come and go. The recent “Mob Wife” aesthetic that exploded on TikTok in 2024 and encouraged gaudy animal prints, flashy jewelry, big fur coats and other wealth signifiers, sent younger generations looking for real fur garments to parade around in.

Rest assured, we will keep educating consumers about the fact that new or old, wearing any fur is an egregious display of disrespect because it implies it’s ok to torture animals.

We don’t want vintage fur wearers opening the doors for the fur industry to start killing more animals again. If history teaches us anything at all, it’s that it often repeats itself, because we humans stubbornly don’t learn our lessons.

We cannot show complacency towards the fur industry, the zenith of animal cruelty.

Animal advocates have made too much progress to go back; all fur, whether made from animals who were killed recently or decades ago, deserves to be stigmatized once again. Flip off fur—second-hand or not—forever.