Why one of the world’s top fur producers just banned fur farms

The world’s second-largest fur producer is saying goodbye to fur. On Tuesday, Poland passed a law to phase out fur farms over the next eight years — a major blow to the global fur industry.

In 2023, fur farmers in the Central European nation killed some three million foxes, minks, raccoon dogs, and chinchillas for coats and trim, accounting for about one out of every seven animals in the international fur trade.

The wild animals are confined in small wire-bottom cages for months — in facilities that resemble the kind of factory farms where animals are raised for meat — until they’re killed via carbon dioxide gassing or anal electrocution. Their pelts are then shipped around the world to clothing manufacturers and fashion houses.

A recent poll found that over two-thirds of Poles support a fur farm ban. “This is a decision that Poles have awaited for many years,” Poland’s President Karol Nawrocki said in a video posted on X. “A decision that reflects our compassion, our civilizational maturity, and our respect for all living creatures.”

Since the 1980s, animal activists around the world have campaigned against fur farming. Progress was slow going for decades but accelerated in the mid-2010s, with the number of animals farmed for fur falling from 140 million in 2014 to 20.5 million in 2024.

That progress came about through a combination of country-level bans; protests against major fashion houses and retailers; and economic challenges in China and Russia, the biggest fur buyers. Poland’s new law should only speed up that momentum.

Poland’s fur farm ban is a case study in persistence, given it was activists’ seventh attempt to pass such a law. It’s also a case study in coalition building.

While activists in the country have protested against fur farms for decades, their campaign picked up speed in 2012 when the advocacy group Anima International released a sprawling investigation into more than 50 fur farms, including some owned by titans of the country’s fur industry. The investigation revealed animals packed tightly into small, filthy cages; animals suffering from severe injuries; dead animals rotting in cages with living ones (and lots and lots of maggots); and animals pacing in their cages and repeatedly biting the sides of their enclosures (signs of stress and frustration).

More investigations by Anima International — and the animal rights group Viva! Poland — followed, along with protests, campaigns pressuring retailers to ditch fur, and support from celebrities and politicians.

Activists also found allies in the countryside where the fur farms are located. Bigger fur farms are “a great nuisance,” Kirsty Henderson, president of the European animal protection group Anima International, told me over email. “The smell is unbearable, the quality of life decreases, and property values drop.” According to Henderson, rural activists have held 180 protests — around one per month on average — since the early 2010s.

And as the global fur industry collapsed over the last decade, so did Poland’s, which weakened the economic argument to keep fur farms open. The law will provide severance for farmworkers and owners, with higher payments to operators who shut down sooner.

“It’s obviously disappointing news but fur farming is very strong still in a number of European countries and our world leading fur is used by top fashion brands,” Jyrki Sura, a program director at the International Fur Federation, told me in an email.

Poland’s fur farm ban alone is a big deal, but its impact could ripple across the entire continent.

In 2023, animal welfare activists gathered 1.5 million signatures from European Union citizens in support of an EU-wide fur-farming ban. That required the European Commission — the EU’s executive branch — to formally consider and respond to the proposal. It’s still weighing a ban, which has faced opposition from some politicians in Poland, Finland, and Greece. But that opposition should weaken now that Poland has proactively banned fur farming within its own borders.

“If the continent’s biggest producer can ban this cruel practice, there is no reason the European Union cannot do the same,” Henderson of Anima International told me. “It’s time for Brussels to end the patchwork approach and introduce comprehensive legislation that reflects the clear will of European citizens.”

While most industrialized forms of animal exploitation have only grown in recent decades, Poland’s ban and other recent developments in the campaign against fur farming shows progress is possible. Just this week, New York Fashion Week announced it will not allow fur on runways, with the CEO of the organization that plans the annual event stating that he “hopes to inspire American designers to think more deeply about the fashion industry’s impact on animals.”

The future, it’s now clear, is fur-free. It’s just a matter of how soon that future arrives.

Update, December 8, 12:45 pm: This story was originally published on December 5. Otwarte Klatki has been updated to Anima International to reflect the organization’s international title.