Soon valuable animals will be leaving Ukraine forever as furs

To demonstrate their integrity and disregard for the power of money, warriors in Middle Ages raised animal furs, or soft gold, on their spears as a kind of banners. Since people discovered barter, furs have been valued so highly that they could be exchanged only for gold. Even in the seventeenth century, to buy a fox fur coat one had to sell forty calves.

Now animal skins are hoisted on their spears by green warriors, incidentally, much for the same reason: it is immoral to kill animals to demonstrate one’s wealth. The Greens have succeeded in undermining fur exports to Europe and America of Soviet Union’s largest fur company, Soyuzpushnina (Soviet Furs), something even the collapse of the Soviet Union and its economic downfall had failed to do.

Should Ukraine want to dress its army in furs, its chances to do this would be almost zero. “Soft gold, viewed as a strategic product in pagan times and a match for such industry branches as electricity and oil extraction, is almost history for Ukraine. Of the twenty-eight fur farms we had a couple of years ago, barely five have survived, with fur production falling down from two million skins to a mere 200,000. Consequently, skins were declared a critical import item in 1999 exempted from any import duties. Meanwhile, the fur farm in Sokal, the largest in Ukraine, was declared bankrupt.

THE FORMER FUR CAPITAL OF UKRAINE

A century ago, to obtain a status of a fur master, one had to serve four years as apprentice, then spend another two years traveling and acquiring skills. Just the opposite happens today, as fur masters have to hit the road mainly to distant countries, offering their expertise and furs for sale.

In a fearful mood, we are on our way to Sokal, a town in Lviv oblast and bankrupt fur capital, recalling that in 1997 the local fur farm was at the peak of its development for the number of mature animals and cubs. The farm’s annual production included 125,000 minks, 5,000 foxes, 2,000 nutrias, and 500 polar foxes. Despite its good production record, however, the farm ran into wage arrears. To repay the arrears, the farm directors used a third of the loan earmarked to buy animal fodder in 1997, thus helping people at the expense of animals.

SACRIFICE

Such sloppy management was a death sentence for the majority of the farm stock, with about 40,000 starving to death that same year. The huge farm stalled, and its employees watched their fluffy future perishing and wept. The fur farm, where people as usual turned out to be the more beastly, was stricken with panic, as between one and two thousand minks died a day. At some point, the animals began to eat their brethren.

Next year, debts tightened the financial noose even more on the animals, with no funds available to buy vaccines. The Sokal Farm’s veterinary doctor Volodymyr Komnatny recalls his devastation when tests revealed plague among the animals. The results proved ruinous for Ukraine’s largest fur farm, with 34,000 cubs dying in 1998.

Barter was another reason why the Sokal fur farm went bankrupt. For almost three years the farm exported skins in exchange for fish to one Swiss firm, via the latter’s office in Russia, delivering between $450 and $600 worth of skins for one ton of fish – instead of buying sub-product food at four times less. Both animals and farm workers paid a dear price for such ineffective management, with 80% of workers finding themselves on the streets.

SOKAL TOTEM REINCARNATION

Still, some of the farm personnel kept their jobs, beginning to work for a new fur farm, Halychkhutro (Galicia Furs), that bought part of the bankrupt farm. The four joint owners of the new farm were the only ones who showed interest in the rundown farm. Add to this that the newly created Halychkhutro was the first privately owned farm in Ukraine, competing against heavy odds for clients and survival with cooperative farms in Eastern Ukraine.

“Through the stock exchange we have succeeded in buying the farm’s basic facilities,” Halychkhutro Director Vasyl Mukha says. “We also bought 3000 females and 700 males, paid back wages to employees, and even managed to raise pay this year.”

Despite their sleek looks, the animals on the revived farm consume two tons of food worth 1,200 hryvnias a day. Being seasonal production, the sales of skins wind up before Christmas, with loans becoming the only conceivable life raft for the farm. To resuscitate the lucrative fur business, last year the government exempted farmers from excises and allocated funds for purchasing pedigree cubs. Sadly, all these measures have not been implemented, remaining on paper only. Loath to rely on any such favors from the state, the Sokal farmers began to add fresh blood, interbreeding their flock.

After two years things with this lucrative business improved so much that the farmers began selection programs making it possible to breed animals whose beauty matched those from bygone days. Today, a mink skin costs $30, and a fox skin about fifty, with private fur-dressers remaining basic buyers. Due to a high-profile protest campaign by animal lovers in the West, Ukrainian fur farms (more humane than trappers according to the protesters), quite paradoxically, were showered with well-paying foreign contracts.

TICKET FOR UKRAINE

In the former Soviet Union over 50% of fur skins was exported. Whatever was left sold like hot cakes, with Sokal farmers still remembering the long lines of would-be buyers at the farm gates which began to form in the early hours of the night or the extreme difficulty, requiring considerable personal connections, of buying a mink hat. Among the other former Soviet states, fur farming was best preserved in Lithuania and Belarus, with Ukraine still a long way to go to catch up with them.

It was the cage method production that became Ukraine’s fur farm’s ticket to sales abroad. Recent developments on the world fur market helped focus investor attention on Ukraine, with more and more farms becoming export oriented, albeit at the expense of more humane countries. The Thou Shalt Not Kill campaign has left its mark on Europe, with the UK banning cage production of animals and Denmark and the Netherlands soon to follow suit. This has made foreign fur dealers look for new markets and enlarge investments in fur production elsewhere.

Thus, sleek silver foxes and minks of Ukrainian origin could well help save Ukraine’s economy, not by quacking, as Rome’s geese did, but by their fur skins or rather as boas that will adorn the shoulders of wealthy women.