Hello everyone, my name is Ryan and you're listening to The Vegan Report. If you are an
ethical vegan and you care to do more to end animal abuse, then this podcast is for you.
Every Tuesday, discover passionate, thought-provoking and inspiring vegan leaders from all walks of life
who will inspire you to take action. Today we are going to talk about minks and their
horrendous exploitation for making fur coats and accessories like lashes. No, you did not
misheard me, this abomination exists and this is how PETA denounces it in a blog post.
In Australia and other countries, mink lashes have become popular. Their mink fur, that's been shaved
off a mink's body, that are then glued in strains to a human's eyelashes for a fuller and thicker
look. Mink lashes are often sold as 100% cruelty-free or safely collected from a free-range farm
or even taken only after the minks have been brushed. Minks are the most commonly farmed
fur-bearing animals in the world. If you purchase a mink fur coat or a set of mink lashes,
you're supporting an industry in which animals endure immense fear, stress, disease, parasites
and other physical and psychological hardships. To discuss this topic, I have with me Malcolm
Klimovic, a professional photographer and an animal rights activist who got in legal troubles
for denouncing this industry. Malcolm, welcome to the podcast. Thank you so much for being here.
Malcolm Klimovic Thanks for having me, Ryan. I'm looking forward to telling our viewers about the
mink farm industry and the fur farm industry in general. One point I'd just like to make for the
viewers is, despite the claims of minks being brushed or their fur collected humanely, the
those lashes, the fur always comes with the skin attached after it's rubbed off the mink's body.
So it's pretty horrifying and cruel, in my opinion.
S1A3L001 Well, let us start by maybe getting listeners familiarized.
Familiarized? I'm losing my English. Sorry. I will edit that out. With minks, can you give
us an idea of what kind of animals they are? Because I feel like people don't have a clear
understanding. We know what a ferret is and minks resemble ferrets, but they're far from being ferrets.
Give us an idea of what is a mink.
Malcolm Klimovic So minks and ferrets, I believe they're both in the weasel family.
They're similar. Minks are semi aquatic animals. So they spend, you know, I think like 60 or 70%
of their time swimming around in the water and like wetlands. If you actually look at minks feet,
the fingers or the digits are actually webbed so they can swim. They've evolved that way
to be close to water. Obviously, on fur farms, they don't have access to that. So
they're denied their natural instinct to swim. In the wild, they travel about 10, 20 kilometers
per day at least. And in a fur farm, they don't have that kind of access to like freedom of
movement or being able to do what they want to do. I've not heard of free range mink farms. Usually
factory farms and the cages are about the size of a couple sheets of paper big. So the farms will be
pacing back and forth. Whereas in the wild, they're just going to be swimming or burrowing,
doing the kind of natural stuff they love to do, you know, foraging or hunting for food.
Yeah, they're very kind of like more solitary animals. But on fur farms, they'll cram up to 10
dozen of these animals together in cages. So on a fur farm, they're actually they'll have
what's called a cannibalism stage during the growth season of the minks where they'll actually
attack each other or, you know, mutilate themselves from boredom and frustration. Whereas in the wild,
they're not doing any of that kind of stuff. Usually they're kind of more on their own.
Yeah, they're beautiful natural animals. I've seen minks out on camping, on camping trips.
You know, they're very, very just like normal creature, just like any other that, you know,
don't deserve to end up on a horrifying factory farm. So
yes. So where can we find them? They're present in the wild in North America, and in Europe,
I think.
Yeah, I think the main ones that I know for the North American minks, which are native to
all of North America, Canada, the US, so you can find them in any kind of natural wetland. A lot
of the times the European minks are actually the farms import North American minks, and then they'll
end up going into the wild population and, you know, bringing different diseases and stuff that
aren't natural to Europe. So you see stuff like during COVID, they had infections with some of
the mink farms there. And I think in Denmark, they actually had to call all of the mink in the
country, and then they banned for farming because of these zoonotic diseases, whereas maybe you
won't see the exact same stuff here. But yeah, they're very, like they're supposed to be in
North America, you see them all over the place here when they're out in wetlands.
And I remember, I think I've only seen one mink in the wild in my life, and it was a white, it had
a white fur. They must come in different colors. So how do farmers, because I think they try to
have like a uniform color to make the coats and accessories. So do they select them? Do they use,
you know, selective breeding in order to get minks of only one color or something like that?
So yeah, the color, I'm not 100% sure of their process of selection. But I do know from what
I've seen, there are fully white minks, fully black minks, gray minks, and I'm sure they probably
have, you know, everything in between. But definitely, I think the predominant ones are
full colored. And these minks, you know, have been bred only in captivity for around 100 years. So
they're not domesticated like other farm animals like our pig or cow or chicken, these animals are
very wild. They want to engage in their natural behaviors and stuff like that. But I do know one
interesting fact about the colors of the minks there. I remember reading somewhere, you know,
the Animal Liberation Front is a group that will do things like release minks into the wild.
Sometimes if they're not able to, they'll find the white minks and they'll dye their fur with
non poisonous dye like non toxic dyes that the farmers can't use them as a form of economic
sabotage against the mink industry.
That's amazing. That's genius. And a final point about minks, and maybe listeners will find it a
bit silly, but they're cute. They're actually very cute. So it adds to the level of
you know, how can you be so evil toward a creature that looks so cute?
Yeah, actually, it makes when I was in the fur farms there and doing my video recordings of them,
they actually remind me very much of cats. They're kind of a similar size, a bit smaller,
maybe a bit longer, but their behaviors resemble cats quite a bit like they'll lay on their backs
with their bellies out and they'll like communicate to each other and just kind of roll around and
it's kind of horrifying the way people have the disconnect between you know, like a companion
animal and these wild animals. Whereas you know, people care more about your companion animal and
if it's a wild animal somehow gets put into some category in their minds where you could treat them
poorly. So you know, imagine, you know, if you're looking at a picture of a mink farm instead of
minks and there's just filled with cats, how people would feel a little bit different.
And how did you, how did you get got interested in minks and the exploitation of things?
Well, I used to live in Kitchener, Ontario, as part of an animal rights group there and
one of my friends one time we just, they lived out in the country. And we took a ride out to
a mink farm and actually got up close and I looked through the fence and I could actually see the
minks. And you know, at that moment, I made a promise to myself that I'd do everything I could
to stop that. It was horrifying to me. So we started doing protests at that mink farm during
the day with signs and stuff, we'd have the media come. I tried to raise awareness about it and then
I went further with my activism eventually after I found that wasn't having much interest in
just doing these protests in the country. And those farms are located in rural areas? Is it
the same as like a pig farm or? Yeah, it's all rural areas. The only case I can remember of one
being kind of inside a city was Kitchener Waterloo. They had a mink farm, I guess at some point on the
outskirts of the city, which was farmland and then as urban sprawl took more and more of like
natural and wildlife land away. This one particular area near the mink farm became very affluent,
they'd built like, you know, semi mansions, there is very wealthy people that live there.
And they didn't like the smell of the mink manure, because it's, I found the smell is very intense
and like nauseating, to tell you the truth. And they lobbied the city, I think, to close this farm
down and then it shut down at some point because wealthy people didn't like the smell. But they
probably, you know, in their closets, probably had mink coats at the same time, which is very
conflicting ideas. Same with pig farms or big slaughterhouses. The smell is absolutely
horrendous. I never entered a slaughterhouse or a pig farm, but I once was nearby one. And
the smell, you know, it's just, it gives you tears to your eyes. So can you give us an idea, and you
brushed off on that before, of the, you know, conditions in which those minks are in?
Yeah, the fur farms there are pretty horrifying places. I'll kind of backtrack there for your
listeners, so you get an idea of like, why and how I went into mink farms. So I saw a documentary,
probably around like 2014, 2015, called Insight Fur, which followed activists from
I believe it was Norway, Norway. They visited hundreds of fur farms with their cameras and they
were recording, you know, the horrifying conditions there. And they made a documentary called Insight
Fur, and it got huge media attention there. So it was, you know, in the public conscience very much,
because it was constantly in the media, it got debated in parliament. At some point,
the media started to get a little bit more interested in the fur farms. And so I went
into the media, it got debated in parliament. At some point, that footage helped lead to a fur farm
ban in that country. So I wanted to recreate that here. I didn't want to reinvent the wheel and
start like some kind of new activism. I wanted to do something that had been successful, at least
somewhere else. So I decided to do, you know, a public inquiry into five mink farms in particular
in southern Ontario. So I went on different occasions, you know, these farms have basically
a barbed wire fence around the property. The fence goes into the ground so that the minks can't burrow
underneath if they escape. The fences are often electrified. They have alarm systems on them.
So if you touch them, it could call the farmer or police officer. They also have, you know,
security cameras everywhere, infrared cameras to watch. Some of these farms have guard dogs on them.
On one occasion, I was chased away by a guard dog. It was a pretty horrifying experience.
Lennon This sounds like a prison. You're describing a prison.
David Yeah, these places, you know, it's a prison for minks, for animals. And then inside the fence
there, you have these long sheds. And I don't want people to have any illusions here. But these places
are, you know, factory farms. It's not nothing free range, nothing nice. These animals don't have
access to anything. Once you get inside the sheds, they're they're wire cages. They look like a cage
you'd catch a raccoon or like a wild animal with to relocate. They're about the same size. And
they're stacked like, thousands, tens of thousands side by side, they're raised up. These animals
never leave the cages. They're born in there and then they die in there. The farmer feeds them like
a slop of food on top of the cage that the way they eat is they have to stand up in the cage and
just like a gooey meat from the top of the cage. I was in these farms, you know, you're supposed to
change the food a few times a day by the Ontario agriculture regulations. But like, obviously,
that's not happening on these farms. When I was there, the food is kind of rotted. It's infested
of bugs. These animals have to eat that. And then at the same time, you know, they stand on wire
constantly. So they have no other place really in the cage to, you know, rest. Their paws actually,
in some cases become deformed from standing on wire constantly because they're not supposed to do
that. And then they defecate in their own cage. The feces are supposed to fall through to the bottom.
And I guess the farmers are supposed to clean it up, you know, every day or something like that.
But that's not definitely not happening on these farms. You can see from the videos that I shot,
some of the manure is piled up from the ground about two feet back up to the cage. There's these
sludge pits of urine filled with maggots and, you know, bugs and stuff like that. It's just
the stench, you know, the toxic fumes coming from the feces and from the urine is like
the most nauseating, horrifying thing you can imagine. That's what sticks with me every time
I go into the country and I smell the feces and stuff like that, it kind of triggers these
horrifying memories. And these animals, you know, they spend their whole lives in these cages. So
they don't engage in natural behaviors like burrowing or swimming. Like I said before,
they end up getting, I think it was called zucosis, which is a stereotypy behavior or
stereotypical behavior that's abnormal for animals that they don't usually engage in.
You see these behaviors in places like zoos where animals, any kind of animal can't roam freely,
which includes like pacing back and forth in the cage, mutilating themselves, you know,
chewing off their own limbs, attacking each other, rubbing their bodies against the wire cages until
they're raw and bleeding. It's because of frustration and boredom because these animals
absolutely have nothing to do in there. By the law, the Ontario, from the Ontario Minister of
Agriculture, these animals are supposed to have what's called an enrichment in the cage, which is
nothing more than like a piece of wood on a string or maybe a golf ball, something that the animals
can manipulate so that they don't engage in these behaviors. Like imagine you're in a prison, they
give you a golf ball, that's all you have for your whole life to do anything with. And you know,
the these farms, a lot of them weren't even offering these to animals, they had nothing in
their cages. And you know, the food falls through into the cage and it mixes with their feces and
these animals are eating that and sleeping in it. It is a horrifying, it's worse than hell,
in my opinion, worse than a puppy mill. At some point, they get slaughtered in order to get their
fur. How does that happen? So for different animals, it's slightly different. So for makes
in particular, they have like a cart that they'll bring with them. And it's hooked up to carbon
monoxide. So they basically will grab the minks out of these cages with these big leather gloves,
you can't hold them make they'll bite you right away. So they have to have these thick gloves
because they're trying to be attacked and they're trying to see their lights, they throw them in the
box and they suffocate. Basically, they have no air, they have carbon monoxide and they suffocate
these animals. Foxes in Canada, your viewers may be surprised to learn that the euthanize them with
electricity, the electrocute foxes to death, they'll put an electrode in their mouth and one in their
rectum, and then the electrocute them. And that's considered humane in Canada. I don't know,
a single person in the world that would allow that to happen to their companion animals, the way of
euthanasia and considered humane. It is horrifying. It's illegal in many places around the world.
Canada is way behind on animal welfare laws and all that kind of stuff needs to end. It's not
humane in any form or sense of suffocation, electrocution and school.
And the reason why they use such sadistic ways of slaughtering minks and foxes is because they
want to preserve the fur. Is that a good assumption?
Yeah, that's probably one of the main reasons. Also cost, they want to keep costs down so they
profit. These whole operations are not there for animal welfare, they're for the farmer to make
some money for profits. And let's talk about the fur. It is considered a luxury item and
it baffles me that some people look at that fur and think luxury instead of abuse, oppression,
torture, slaughter. How do you explain that disconnect? How do you explain that in 2023,
we still have people in denial of where fur are coming from? I can understand, you know, dairy and
meat. But fur, I feel like it's way up there in public perception of this is bad. Like, I think
animal rights activists have done a great job at relying the message that this is particularly bad
practice. And I think most people are aware of that. But how do you explain that disconnect? And
how is it that there's still a market for that fur?
Well, the market's getting smaller, which is good news. You know, activists, celebrities, politicians
are fighting the fur trade all over the world. But at the same time, you have, you know, these
luxury brand fur products, you know, the fur products, the fur products, the fur products,
these luxury brand companies, like number one enemy is Louis Vuitton, owned by LVMH. They spend,
you know, millions of dollars promoting their brands and promoting fur as luxurious. So,
you know, how powerful advertising is, like when you go to Super Bowl ad or something like that,
it's obviously going to influence people. If you see some famous rapper, like actress or celebrity,
like Kim Kardashian or somebody coming out with a fur coat, these people want to emulate, you know,
wealth and fame. So they want to be like these people. Another thing that's interesting about
that is in the 90s, and like before that, full length fur coats were very popular. It was very
a class thing too. If you wanted to show that you're wealthy, you'd have a big long fur coat.
I think the same kind of still holds true today, but not as much. Regular people, you won't see
them wearing full length furs because of the cost. And also people do associate it with cruelty.
Around the time of the 2000s, I would say the fur industry tried to reinvent itself. So they got
rid of, a lot of designers got rid of the full length furs. They started incorporating things
like fur trim, fur pom poms, little fur decorations onto clothing so that it was more consumable by
the average public. I think a lot of people too don't understand the cruelty that happens on fur
farms. Not everybody has had an experience like me. Not everybody's seen videos of the inside of
a fur farm. Sometimes people think, you know, the hair is brushed off the animal or it's collected
humanely in some way, shaved, but it's not, it's not like a sheep or something like that.
The fur always comes with the skin. And another thing too, these luxury brands are,
I guess activists have been targeting them specifically in the last, I think three years.
So you're seeing designers like, you know, Saks, that's Avenue, other designers in a Gucci going
fur free and not from the goodness of their hearts, but because of pressure campaigns.
Organized by activists like the CAFT, the coalition to abolish the fur trade has been very
instrumental in organizing activists globally to target one designer at a time. So, you know,
see activists instead of going to all sorts of different fur stores, we target one designer.
And then it's a huge amount of pressure for these designers to drop fur. We did that a few years ago
to the brand Redsac, who your listeners may be familiar with. They owned over 20,000
stores in Quebec, Ontario, one in New York. And we targeted them nonstop with store disruptions,
protests. We had email blockades, phones, apps, doing demonstrations at the owner's homes and
in front of the rich mansions. And, you know, just constantly keeping on them to drop fur.
And eventually Redsac went for free. Again, you know, none of these people are doing it from the
goodness of their hearts. It's because people are coming to these protests supporting the anti-fur movement.
So we need more people to come out. And then as we're doing that, we're educating the public,
everybody that walks by our protests, you know, they can hear a chance, they can talk to us.
We give them a flyer. They see the signs. Then they can act, you know, email the company,
tell them to go for a free or call them or whatever. We had a lot of people supporting
us during the Redsac campaign. And, you know, things are changing. So hopefully public opinion
keeps shifting against the fur industry and against animal cruelty.
You mentioned the owners and the big brands driving this business. But a focus of mine
is talking about the workers in those factories or farms. Have you met them? Do they fit the
profile of like slaughterhouse workers, you know, poor people who are usually immigrants or minorities,
and they're the ones doing the dirty job of slaughtering minks and, you know, keeping them imprisoned?
Yeah, I have not met any workers myself. They're not as prolific as like say a slaughterhouse worker.
Slaughterhouse workers, you know, it's a huge industry, way bigger than fur. Fur is kind of a niche industry still.
And I think it's usually a farmer who would hire, you know, their friends or somebody close to them in the community.
They do often hire very vulnerable people. There's actually a documentary that I'm in called Ending Real Fur.
And the director interviewed one person that was an ex slaughterhouse worker who used to work, I believe, for his uncle.
And, you know, he's had trouble having employment elsewhere. So he had to work at fur firms for a long time.
He himself says it's horrifying. And they do hire, you know, vulnerable populations of people,
people that, you know, if they do try to be whistleblowers, maybe the police wouldn't believe them,
that kind of stuff. And, you know, these workers are just like slaughterhouse workers, these employees,
these people get, you know, post-traumatic stress disorders and stuff like that.
From, you know, having to kill hundreds of animals, you can't do that every day and, you know,
end up having like a clear conscious or like a sound mind after that. It takes a chunk out of you.
Like myself, just visiting these fur farms for a couple hours a time, it still sticks with me for
the rest of my life. Every time I smell that like manure or like drive by one of those places,
I have memories that are pretty horrifying. So I can't imagine what these workers have to go
through in the film and ending real fur. So the worker at the fur farm talked about this particular
mink named Gandalf, and he was, you know, he had to call the mink and he asked his uncle if he could
keep that one mink as a pet. And he said, sure. And then he came back to an empty cage that had
been killed and turned into a coat for 30 bucks. Yeah. And it adds to the layer of, you know,
frustration and evil of that whole industry because it's a business around, you know, luxury.
And the clients are very wealthy people. The brands are very powerful and influential. But
at the end of the, you know, at the bottom of the pyramid, you have those workers who are
vulnerable from vulnerable populations. You know, there's something perverse to it. It adds to the
whole social inequality aspect of this industry. And yeah, there's absolutely no redeeming quality
to the fur industry. So you mentioned now a few times that you had firsthand experience of
infiltrating a fur farm, well, a mink farm. So can you describe that experience? Did you do it
several times or was it just one time? And can you describe how did you infiltrate that farm? And
what did you see? Basically what happened? Yeah, so I went to five different mink factory farms in
different regions of Ontario. I'd seen footage from inside some of these farms from other sources.
I wanted to kind of go into these farms and record so many different farms that if I shared
the footage with the authorities and with the public, that nobody could say that you know,
it's one particular farmer doing this to these animals because I saw the same neglect and criminal
animal, you know, neglect and cruelty at various farms that there was a standard in the industry.
So basically I would drive out to these farms in the evening and I would come back later that night
after I kind of scoped it out and I would just approach the property. They're often surrounded
by, you know, like farm fields and stuff like that, like you're way out in the country, there's
nobody around, it's pretty quiet. It's actually really easy to get up close to these farms
other than, you know, going over a fence and like avoiding some of the security. When I went,
nobody was really doing that but now there's probably more security within the industry.
I heard that they hired some expert from the states which does security for the fur farms
there to come to Ontario and I know the one fur farmer that took me to court, he said that he had
hired night guards and stuff like that. I never encountered that but I think that's a good
thing, apparently, you know, the farmers are spending money on that now. But, you know,
all these things can be avoided if you know what you're doing. You can still get into these places,
still record or rescue animals or whatever activists want to do. Basically I would just like
find a weak point in the fence and hop over and then I'm inside the farm. Just, you know,
the doors on the main sheds are open. You could actually, even if you wanted to videotape from
the outside, most of them, yeah, you can enter. There was one I went to that was like a state-of-the-art
facility that had been built like a couple of years before my investigation there. That one was
completely locked. You'd have to break like a door to get in and I didn't want to, you know, I never
damaged anything. I never vandalized anything when I was there. I would just like hop the fence,
enter the farm. That one particular one I filmed just from the outside because the
cages are exposed to the outside and they had like, I said they had like air conditioning there
and, you know, all these, the cages are brand new so they weren't rusted like the other farms.
But what I did notice is that those animals in the state-of-the-art facility still engaged in
those stereotypical behaviors, swaying back and forth, breaking their teeth, chewing the bars,
that kind of stuff. So it's not the fact that some of these places are decrepit. That's just like
extra cruelty. But, you know, even if you have a state-of-the-art facility like that, that's
brand new, that has the enrichments, that has everything, these animals still show that they're
suffering through these stereotypical behaviors. You know, some of these places do have like guard
dogs, which I encountered to get chased off the farm. My guard dog had to run back to my jeep
to get away, which was a really horrifying experience. I hope nobody has to deal with that.
But yeah, it's just you go out at night, you know, the farmers are asleep. Their houses are
usually pretty far away from the mink part of the farm because, you know, they don't want to smell
that manure and stuff right next to their house, I'm sure. Yeah, and they're all kind of similar.
They all kind of have the same kind of operation going on, just fences around them, big long mink
sheds. People, they want to find these places, they could go to thefinaldale.com, which has a
list of addresses of mink firms across North America, which is updated every few years.
Also, looking on a satellite image on Google images, you can see very long rows of mink sheds.
It's very kind of a unique image on Google satellite images. So if you want to find a place
like that, you could look on that and kind of see how to enter the firm.
Amazing. I will add that link in the description below. So you go there at night, you don't meet
anyone else. Like you said, you never met a worker of that industry. And you don't vandalize,
you don't break anything. You just look and document, film, take, you know, produce some
footage of what is happening inside. Do the minks notice your presence?
Yeah, the minks will definitely be aware that you're there, especially at night, because you
know, I have a big flashlight or LED light on my camera to record. It's funny that you mentioned
that one of the first articles that came out about my investigation in the media, they always had a
spokesperson from the fur industry talking about me and said that I was traumatizing the mink with
the flashlight somehow. These animals I was recording were literally sleeping and eating
food with feces mixed into it. You know, the horrifying things they do to these animals,
each year, you know, 90% of these animals are going to be suffocated to death with carbon
monoxide gas. And they accuse me of harming the animals with a flashlight, which is insane.
But yeah, these animals do vocalize to each other. They interact with each other. Sometimes if
they're not in the cannibalism stage, they'll kind of snuggle together and sleep together if they're
babies. But yeah, they do definitely recognize that people are there. So just like a cat or a
dog, they'll like same as any other animal. Have you ever felt like freeing one of those minks and
getting away with it? I think anybody that's animal rights activists maybe thought about rescuing an
animal at some point. You know, of course I did, but that wasn't my purpose to go to these firms.
Unfortunately, it was one of the most heartbreaking things I had to do is to walk away from those
places and leave them there. But my only hope at the time was that the OSPCA, the Ontario Society
for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, would step in and, you know, shut these farms down for good
so that generations and generations of these animals wouldn't have to go through something
like that. Unfortunately, that's not what happened. The OSPCA, I think, did visit some of these farms,
but no action is taken. Actually, after I took these recordings to Animal Justice, we created
basically a legal complaint documenting each instance of all my videos of specific laws or
statutes that were being broken, also the codes of practice that the fur industry places on themselves,
broken dozens of times again and again by multiple farmers. I know in other countries that have done
this, you know, the authorities actually closed down these farms. They take the animals out of
there. They charge the farmers criminal activity, this and that. But in my case, that didn't happen.
Actually, at the same time, my investigation was going on. Mine was illegal. It was a public
inquiry. There was a legal operation going on by Last Chance for Animals at the Mailbank fur
farm in Guelph, Ontario, where they had an employee hired by the farmer who was actually an LCA
activist. So they stayed there for a few months and they documented, you know, everything that was
happening to these animals. The same stuff that I saw, but it was all done in a more legal way.
And that farmer ended up getting charged and convicted of animal cruelty. And I think he only
had to pay a very small fine. So, you know, they got it out in the media there. So it was good in
that way, but the laws are way behind. The penalties are too weak to prevent farmers from
doing that. The profit motive is too high. Even though this guy went through, you know, a criminal
trial or whatever, and he got convicted of animal cruelty, he still has this mink farm. Who knows
what's happening to these minks? The one most horrifying part of that investigation was that
there's minks there that obviously were in such bad medical condition, they should have been
euthanized. Like they're, their muscles sticking out of their bodies. Just gross stuff. And this
farmer just said, just leave them, just let them die naturally, which means basically let them
suffer until they die. So this guy is a horrible, horrible person. He should be in jail. And now
because of egg, egg laws like Bill 156, those kinds of investigations are illegal. Things like
mercy for animals, any kind of PETA or whoever had to undercover employee filming animal cruelty,
and they brought it to the authorities, that person would be charged with violating 156.
And they'd have to pay a fine or maybe a criminal penalty. I don't remember all the penalties, but
the farmer definitely won't be charged anymore because of that statute. Well, I want to talk
about the ag, ag laws. But first, let's dive in your legal adventures, the legal consequences you
had to suffer for, again, as a reminder for entering those farms in the middle of the night, not
interacting with anyone, not vandalizing, just taking pictures, not even taking, you know,
rescuing a mink, which would be considered stealing by those people. So for that, you have been
persecuted by, I think, the state. And tell us about when you knew about it, when you learned
that you were being persecuted and how long it lasted and what were the charges. So give us a
bit of details of your legal troubles. Well, that's a long story. I'll try to condense it as much as
possible here. But yeah, so I did the investigation into five different mink farms. Three of the
farmers actually charged me with break and enter. They're in different regions. So what happened,
I'd have like a hearing, I went to Oshawa, one in Collingwood, one in
one in Collingwood and Kingston. So every time I'd have to go to court, we'd have a huge rally and
there would be media there. So it was good in that way and getting the word out, I'd always get like
an interview with the media and people would learn about the cruelty of these farms. But you know,
it's a huge stress to me. I was able to luckily raise, I think, like about $70,000 for my legal
defense because one of these charges did go to trial. The other two got downgraded. One was a
trespass charge that I was convicted of, which is basically nothing. I didn't have to pay a fine or
do anything, no probation. The other charge in Oshawa got dropped completely. And then one of the
last farmer took me to a full criminal trial, which was done online. PETA helped me get a lot
of supporters and the court had to play it on YouTube. So a lot of people around the world
actually saw this trial, which was good. The argument they used, well, I'll explain something
so it's the viewers here. So a break and enter is basically entering property, but you also have to
commit another offense. You can't just break and enter, go into a place and that's a crime. That
does, it's not a thing because, you know, if we walked in somebody's door and then walked back out
or something and you didn't do anything, it's really harmless. It would be considered like a
trespass under the law, which is, you know, for people that aren't going onto farms, it's like
usually a $65 ticket. You could spend a night in jail, but if you do it under the ag gig
legislation now, you can pay up to $20,000 or something like that for doing that. At the time
that didn't exist, so I was, you know, able to do these investigations without worry, I thought,
until I got charged with a break and enter. So they were trying to say, yeah, the break and
enter, there has to be another crime, like, I don't know, stealing stuff usually for breaking
down. You break into something, you steal something, vandalism, kidnapping, whatever, right?
But I did none of those things. They tried to say I did mischief, which was under the law is defined
as the reasonable enjoyment of someone's property. And the farmer was saying that he got, I guess,
an email, a phone call and something on social media saying they didn't like what he was doing.
And he tried to say that because he hired security guards, he had a financial cost to him.
But this was all after, you know, what I did had nothing to do with,
directly to do with my investigation. So the court found me, you know, not guilty because I
hadn't committed any other crimes. They didn't think that me going on to the farm was sufficient.
There was no loss of revenue to the farmer whatsoever. Every mink that was in that farm is,
you know, probably gassed and skinned. And the farmer made money from it. So I didn't cause him
any financial damage. I didn't damage any property or do anything. So they weren't able to show there
was any other crime other than me trespassing. And I got found not guilty, which was huge,
because it was set up, I think, one of the first legal precedents like that in Canada, the activists
could use all over the country. Unfortunately, now it looks like there's going to be federal
ag-gag bill passed and that was put into the parliament by the Conservative Party.
So that was my trouble. Also, at the same time as these break and enter charges were happening,
they were charging me, they were able to put conditions on me. So I wasn't allowed to leave
the province. I wasn't allowed to travel within certain regions within the province.
I got civilly sued by one of the fur farmers for like $20,000 for mental anguish or something.
That ended up going away because my lawyers were some of the best in the world for animal rights.
I had three vegan lawyers, four vegan lawyers as my counsel, animal justice was helping.
So it was a big, long time that took about three years of me going to different courthouses.
Preparing with lawyers, preparing with expert witnesses, just traveling around,
organizing demonstrations at courthouses. So it was really taxing on myself to engage in all these
legal troubles. I won't recommend it for everybody because you do get burned out after that.
But at the same time, I did generate dozens and dozens and dozens and dozens of media stories
against the fur industry every time we have one of these protests or demonstrations at a courthouse.
The media would be there to listen to my story. I think that did turn public opinion in Ontario
against fur quite a bit. We used to protest at the North American Fur Auction in Toronto.
By the time all these media stories were coming out, they lost their… they didn't go into bankruptcy,
but they went into creditor protection status, which is almost similar to bankruptcy. They don't
hold auctions anymore. And it was the second largest in the world. Basically, every fur farmer
in Canada would send mink pelts to this auction. They don't do them anymore, which is huge. I don't
know if it's directly because of me, but I'm sure the media stuff, at some point, their creditors
are like, oh man, this stuff's losing money and public's turning against it. And people are going
into these fur farms and doing this and that. So that was one win. Also, to note the fur farmer
that took me to trial, he closed his fur farm shortly before the trial started and no more minks
are going to be killed by that guy. Luckily. In preparation for this interview, I read some
of the articles that covered your legal case. And all I could think of is this is a case
of a circus. This is a joke. And one of the points that you talked about that judges and
lawyers would bring up is, oh, but he was harming the minks. His presence there was in some way
harming the animals. And like you mentioned, the fact that they are treated so badly and then
slaughtered in the worst possible conditions to have the arrogance and I would argue the madness
of saying that you were the one harming them by just filming those poor creatures.
It just felt completely, I felt a disconnect with the logic of the whole thing. It's like
those laws don't make any sense. And we need the big judicial reform in terms of how we think about
animals and their wellbeing, because this is just stupid on a whole other level.
I think with that, with people saying that I harmed the animals in some way by witnessing
them suffering. I think Johnny Depp said it best is like, if you don't like pictures of animal
cruelty, you don't stop the pictures, you stop the animal cruelty. So that's my thoughts on that.
That's a good way of putting it. Okay, let's talk about the AGAC laws.
I covered the topic with Liz White, the leader of the Animal Protection Party of Canada.
And it is considered one of the biggest threat in the animal rights activism world.
So why is that? What are those laws about? And why do they represent such a threat for activists?
So my thoughts on AGAC laws is that the specific one in Ontario, I can't speak to the others
because I don't know them all, but that one, the increase is fine for trespassing onto farms,
so it targets stuff like I did. I don't think it will stop people from doing that because I knew
what I was doing was illegal in the first place and it could have gone to trial. And it'll never
stop people that have enough willpower, determination to go on there. And there's a
lot of people that are willing to go to court, as we saw with like, meet the victims in kitchens,
in Kitchener during Thanksgiving, there were about 100 activists that were planning to
break into a turkey factory farm and do a lockdown. They were stopped by the police and
before that happened. But those people are always going to be there, people willing to break the
law to save animals, to rescue them or to film them. So I don't think all the money or the
jail time will stop those types of activists. They're always going to be there. But what it
will stop is legal activism, like stuff like Mercy for Animals used to do, or Last Chance for
Animals where they get an employee hired by the organization or institution or whatever, like for
a farmer. And then they're able to use that footage to take the farmer or whatever slaughterhouse
owner or whatever to court, that will end because those organizations or charity organizations,
they depend on donors and stuff like that. And they can't get caught up in legal battles.
Whereas other individual activists or grassroots organizations probably don't care about that,
that much. So it will stop the bigger organizations that are charities or
doing it legally. And it also targeted the save movement. So those people that go give water to
pigs on boiling hot transport trucks during the summer or try to go record them in the winter
time and these trucks outside the slaughterhouse, their skin is stuck to the side of the metal,
frozen to the side of the metal truck and ripping off. People that document that kind of stuff are
going to be targeted more because of that. And I think these ag gag laws, everybody's going to
say it's going to change the whole landscape of animal rights. It will in some ways hide the
animal cruelty in legal means. But I think what it's having is the opposite effect where it's
driving people to do more underground direct action. In the last year, I know in the United
States, it's been the highest spike of direct action for animals. Mink releases have gone up
exponentially. There's never been more mink releases than this year since the 1990s.
So all the people that wanted to document animal cruelty and bring it to the police or
have these undercover employees go in, everybody's turning to underground actions where they just
release these animals, they rescue them directly, they don't involve the police. It's all underground
and it's increasing more and more, I think, because of these ag gag laws. Because they've
basically criminalized whistleblowers, people that care about animals, people that want to witness
this or hear witness to the slaughter trucks. It's all been criminalized now. So people are
just going underground, cutting out the police and the legal system completely. They're doing it
anonymously and they're directly helping these animals. So many animals have been rescued this
year. It's unbelievable. The animal liberation front last December targeted the largest mink
firm in the United States and it got shut down after a mink release. So these people that maybe
wanted to do it the legal way are going around the law and still helping these animals at the
end of the day. And it's growing and growing. And I don't think it's something that an ag
gag law will stop. It will just stop people doing it in a legal method through the authorities,
through the normal channels. Yeah. And you went through that. You infiltrated those farms,
you uncovered some illegal practices by those farmers, but then they persecute you for having
what uncovered illegal practices by illegal means. It doesn't make much sense. It's the
definition of being a whistleblower. Like what do you expect? Yeah, it's crazy, but I'm happy to
hear you be optimistic about the future of activism work even under those laws. And I hope that
because now there are a few Canadian provinces and US states, I think, who have those laws in place,
there is a political willingness to adopt those laws on a federal level.
But I don't think this will pass, or at least I hope not. I've seen so many activists being
mobilized, or just normal vegans being mobilized around this issue and meeting with their MP and
trying to express the opinion that this is unconstitutional and this should not pass.
So I'm optimistic about that too. Yeah. One of the other points I want to make is the way some of
these ag-gag bills are worded. I don't know about the ones in Canada in particular, but I know there
was one in the states where it basically made documenting and reporting elderly abuse or child
abuse legal under the statute because the way it was worded that people couldn't film was happening
in certain places. So that's crazy. Imagine having your grandma at a nursing home and somebody's
punching her or whatever, or a kid getting hurt by an adult, and then they use this ag-gag bill to
allow that to happen. That's unfathomable. I don't know how people could get behind that.
Again, these ag-gag laws are targeting specific things that we did, like my illegal investigation,
legal investigations, and people burying witness to pigs going to slaughter.
This was lobbied heavily by the animal egg industry to politicians, really because these
three methods are super effective of bringing awareness to the public of what's happening.
People don't know where their meat comes from. People don't know where their fur comes from.
These investigations and people videotaping the trucks is constantly being put out on social
media. It's getting in the regular mainstream media, and then politicians and stuff start
seeing this. The public will turn against it. The industry is fighting for its life right now,
the animal egg industry, by putting these laws out there. There's a saying, maybe it was by Gandhi,
first they laugh at you, then they fight you, and then you win. I think we're going past the
they laugh at you stage, because maybe 10 or 20 years ago, people fighting for animal rights
would just shrug you off. Everybody's using that stuff, but now everything's becoming vegan,
products are becoming synthetic or natural. Society doesn't have the need to use and take
from animals as much as we did before. The industry is having to compete with these vegan
products, these natural or synthetic products that can replace standardized animal products,
and they're targeting what's been most effective against them. These things that are illegal
under the bill are very, very effective. I don't think that's going to stop animal rights activists.
We're just going to find new methods to do this. Just like any social justice movement,
that's very successful. The end of it, the repression comes down very hard. At some point,
people just say, I don't want to do this anymore, I don't want to be part of this. They either go
against the law, or they get people enforcing the law, stop enforcing it, because they don't
believe in it. I think we're going to see a lot of people who are going to be part of this,
I think we're going to see a lot more of that in the next decade.
S1 And this is one more argument for animal rights. If you care about democracy and our
democratic institutions, you should be vegan. You should support the animal rights movement,
because this industry is too powerful. It has captured our governments, whether they are on
the left or the right. I know that some people say, more liberal governments have been allies of
the animal rights movement. Yeah, I mean, define allies. But yeah.
S2 One point I'll say about political parties is that the majority of rule represented MPs
are conservatives. A lot of the conservative MPs do support animal ag in that way. They're the
ones that are introducing this federal ag gag bill. And they're the ones targeting activists.
So you know, if you're going to vote, I would say not to vote conservative, but that's my own
personal opinion. I think there's more leeway on the other end of the spectrum.
S1 Yeah, yes, that's, that's for sure. And I also interpret that as a failure of
the animal rights movement of influencing conservatives, and you know, the conservative
governments, but also conservative people, you know, I produced an episode with two conservatives
who are vegan. I really believe that we should not just be in our liberal bubble, and we should
we should also try to influence and advocate for animal rights in conservative circles. Yeah,
there is hope, we should just, you know, nourish that hope, make it grow into a more concrete
presence of veganism and care for animal rights in conservative circles.
S1 Yeah, I'd say for sure. You know, when I was doing the end fur farming campaign, we're
protesting all these mink farms. At the same time, I was meeting with politicians from every
political party, I met conservatives, liberals, the New Democratic Party, try to inform them all
of what's going on. And I think, you know, there's an election coming up right now. And I think it's
an opportunity for animal rights activists to go show up at these politician events or debates or
whatever, you know, raise the issue of banning fur farms. British Columbia has already banned
fur farming, but we need a federal bill. So or any animal rights issue in general, vegan issue,
go to these debates, go to wherever the politicians are campaigning and bring up, you know, your
animal rights issue, let them know that animals matter, that they're part of our society, and that
they need to stop being exploited in such horrifying ways in our name with our tax dollars.
Or even becoming candidate for the Animal Protection Party of Canada or your, you know,
wherever you are in the world, the Animal Protection Party that is there, the Animal Rights Party.
Yeah, it's an effective way of making a difference. So I really wanted to talk about
the footage, you know, the images that you took of the minks, but also in general that we find online,
I had Gail in from anonymous for the voiceless on, I also had Natalie from the Canada 11 case.
And now I have you and I feel like this is a holy trinity of, you know, footage of animal
exploitation and how it is effective and powerful for advocating for veganism and for changes
in the animal rights space. This has been a recurrent theme in those three episodes. So I
want to hear you as a professional photographer to talk about, you know, the power and also the
influence of that footage, and why is it so essential for the animal rights movement?
Yeah, firstly, I'd just like to say I personally know Gail and Natalie, and they're both amazing
activists. Keep up the good work, both of you. Yeah, I would say photography and, you know,
this video footage, just images of animals in different settings is hugely important,
getting that out to the public to educate them. I think even not only images of animals suffering,
because sometimes, let's be honest, they're hard to watch. I don't always want to watch,
you know, horrifying pictures of animals. I do like what D, Dark Action Everywhere, DxE,
did with their protests that I used to go to in Toronto. They would have pictures of the animals
being exploited, but they would also show the dichotomy of animals in their natural habitats.
So you're not always getting bombarded with horrifying images and people could perceptualize
these animals in nature, I think the way that they're supposed to be portrayed. They're not
just solely, you know, a pig on a truck. Maybe you have a pig at a farm or something like that,
which I guess isn't 100% natural. But like, you know, showing people what's happening with these
animals is important so they know, but also showing them what we're hoping for, what animals'
lives could look like if we weren't exploiting them for meat or for clothing or entertainment,
stuff like that. Show people the animals, who are they meant to be. And like, I always try to think
of like photography. One of my favorite photographers is Joanne MacArthur from Toronto. I think she's
based out of Toronto. Her photography is amazing. Her career inspired me to start doing my own
photography. And also, she showcases her work all over the world. It's very professional. Her photos
are amazing. So I'd recommend people to check out Joanne MacArthur's work. I can't remember the
exact title. Yeah, but yeah, check out Joanne MacArthur. Amazing photos and very powerful. I
think it's true, you know, a photo says a thousand words, you know, you can talk about veganism,
you can talk about animal rights, you can talk about animal liberation to people, and they have
an understanding. But I think once you see a photo, you know, it really touches people's hearts,
it touches their minds and their souls. And people can really empathize and put their selves in the
place of that animal. Maybe if you look into the animal's eyes, you can see, maybe it looks like
your dog at home, maybe your cat at home. Maybe you can think of yourself in a cage or in a
zoo or in an animal testing lab, and you could understand what the animal's going through and
just, you know, have empathy with those animals and just reject their oppression, reject their
exploitation, and reject speciesism. We're all put on this earth, the animals are here with us,
not for us. And we have to share the world with them. So we should do our best to be stewards and
help them and not make life a living hell for them.
Amazing. So Malcolm, did you have anything more to say before we end this conversation?
Yeah, just a couple things I wanted to plug. I'm in a documentary called Ending Real Fur. The
director, Taimur Choudhry, has been working on this film for years and years and started off as a 30
minute film and over the years turned into a feature length film. And it highlights all sorts
of different aspects of the Canadian fur industry. He got famous celebrities involved like Tim Gunn
from Project Runway, you know, famous singers, Ingrid Newkirk from PETA, Animal Justice, Nathan
Aaron, and Daniel Smith, who's a liberal MP based out of Toronto. He actually got him to introduce a
bill to ban fur farming, which hasn't been hugely successful, but it's a start in the right direction
for federal fur farm bill. The film documents my work going into these fur farms, mentions my trial.
There's also a fur farm employee that talks about his experience in the working on a fur farm. And
he's helped galvanize activists all over the world to oppose fur farming and the fur industry in
general. And this film is an amazing feature length film. It's very consumable by the public.
It doesn't have a lot of horrifying images of animals, which turn off some people. There is a
bit of it, of course, but mostly it's interviewing people and talking about the fur industry. He
talks to First Nations people about their thoughts on the fur trade, which is interesting because
native culture people use fur, but they're really against fur farming because it's not
part of their ethics. They have way more respect for an animal, even though I don't agree 100%
with what's going on, but everybody can agree that these fur farms are horrifying and that
they shouldn't exist. Want to do even more than that? Get involved with the coalition to abolish
the fur trade, CAFT USA. They've been spearheading a campaign against various retailers. They've got
a bunch of different major designers to drop fur from their labels, people that are promoting the
idea that fur is luxurious. They're forcing them with direct action, protests, online actions to
get rid of fur. So you can participate anywhere in the world with these campaigns to look up the
coalition to abolish the fur trade, USA. Get involved with that. Right now, the main target is
Louis Vuitton. They're owned by LVMH, which is Louis Vuitton Monet Hennessy. They have a lot of
different fashion houses like Christian Dior, Marc Jacobs, Fendi, and Max Mara. They're all owned by
LVMH. So we've been really targeting these specific brands. They're the largest fashion house in the
world. And if we can get Louis Vuitton to go fur free, it is going to have a huge trickle down
effect on all the other designers, all the other fashion houses in the world. Celebrities will
stop using fur as much, that kind of stuff. And it'll really be, I think, a fatal blow to the fur
trade because once the largest fashion house drops fur, there's going to be nowhere for other
designers to look to to imitate the highest selling fashion brand in the world. So again, look up
coalition to abolish the fur trade. And the main target right now is Louis Vuitton. So if you're
planning a protest against a fur brand anywhere, go after Louis Vuitton. They're the number one
target for animal rights activists right now. That's all I wanted to say, those few things.
So this was a pleasure, Malcolm. Thank you so much for having been a guest and answered my questions
and for all of your great work. Thank you. Thanks for having me on the show,
Ryan. I appreciate it. Go fur free, everybody. Thank you everyone for listening. Before you go,
I have a question for you. Do you believe it is ethically acceptable to purchase Ming Fur at the
secondhand store? I forgot to ask this question to Malcolm during our conversation, but I had the
chance to ask him the question by email. If you want to know his answer, check out the description
below. He made such great points that I had to share his answer with you. I also have a special
announcement to make. This is the last episode of the year 2023. I will be taking a break for the
next two weeks, but I will be back in 2024 with an exciting lineup of guests and topics. I have
really outdone myself for the coming year. In the meantime, let me thank you again for being a friend
of this show. I wish you a joyous holiday season and a happy new year. See you soon.
Thank you.