The science behind the fur free campaign

Header Image – Andrew Skowron / We Animals

Eleven wins into ACTAsia’s twentieth anniversary series, this one is about evidence. ACTAsia’s fur-free campaign is built on rigorous research, including a peer-reviewed paper published in a scientific journal. #11 of 20

Over the past decade, the fur-free campaign has taken ACTAsia from a UN platform to the runway to the retail floor: recognition from the UN, a fashion course built with the London College of Fashion, and more than 120 Chinese brands signed up to go fur-free. The breadth and success of this campaign is founded in rigorous research into what fur farming costs, in terms of animal welfare, health, and the environment.

A peer-reviewed paper on fur farming

In October 2023, Frontiers published a review entitled “One Health Implications of Fur Farming” in their Animal Science journal. Drawing on 280 existing reports, authors Clifford Warwick, Anthony Pilny, Catrina Steedman, and Rachel Grant mapped the risks of an industry that kills between 85 and 100 million animals a year for pelts, across at least 15 species farmed in at least 19 countries.

The findings were substantial. The review identified 16 categories of welfare concern, including deprivation, chronic stress, and abnormal behaviours. It catalogued 18 pathogens with confirmed or potential zoonotic risk – bacterial, viral, and parasitic – capable of crossing from farmed animals to humans. And it set out four categories of environmental harm: greenhouse gas emissions, invasive species, toxic chemical release, and water pollution. Taken together, these findings are what One Health means in practice – welfare, disease, and environmental risk treated as one interconnected problem rather than three separate ones.

Backed by science, not opinion

ACTAsia’s position on fur isn’t just a firm ethical stance, but one backed by science. ACTAsia funded the Frontiers in Animal Science research, but had no input into its design, analysis, or conclusions (as stated plainly in the paper). This distinction is important. It means the welfare, disease, and environmental risks that the paper documents are not a reinstatement of ACTAsia’s claims; they are independent scientific findings. Indeed, these findings confirm what ACTAsia has argued for years. however, this research makes that confirmation credible.

China’s Fur Trade Update 2024/2025 will be available soon.

Grounded in years of ACTAsia’s own research

The Fur-Free Campaign is also backed up by extensive research on behalf of ACTAsia such as “Toxic Fur: A Global Issue” (2018) and “China’s Fur Trade and its Position in the Global Fur Industry” (2019). Warwick et al’s reference list cites ACTAsia’s 2019 report directly. In other words, the science underpinning the fur-free campaign runs in both directions: ACTAsia’s own research fed into an independent peer-reviewed study, which then validated the conclusions ACTAsia started with.

What the evidence buys

This is the foundation underneath the UN’s recognition of ACTAsia’s fur-free work (see win #7), and its invitation into the UN Fashion and Lifestyle Network: not persuasion, but a case that other people – scientists, journalists, institutions – can independently check. It is also why media and UN bodies come to ACTAsia when they need the facts on fur, rather than a position. 

20 Years, 20 Wins 

Twenty years in, it is this sort of rigorous work and commitment to evidence-based advocacy that makes ACTAsia’s fur-free campaign a multifarious win. 

Read the full paper here, or explore ACTAsia’s published resources. 

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