Beverly Hills Furs May Wear Warnings

Beverly Hills is on the verge of telling fur shoppers more than many of them may want to know.

The City Council on Tuesday night voted to set a May 11 special election on an initiative that would force the city’s furriers to put warning tags on their garments, informing customers precisely how the animals were slaughtered for their soft, expensive pelts.

The tags, just larger than a credit card, would read: “Consumer notice: This product is made with fur from animals that may have been killed by electrocution, gassing, neck breaking, poisoning, clubbing, stomping or drowning and may have been trapped in steel-jaw, leg-hold traps.”

Beverly Hills Consumers for Informed Choices collected the signatures of more than 3,300 registered voters, forcing a reluctant City Council to put the measure on the ballot. On Tuesday, dozens of speakers lined up to argue both sides before the council voted 3-1 to send the question to voters, with the mayor voting against and Councilwoman Vicki Reynolds abstaining.

The mayor, meanwhile, wondered how the law would be enforced in this city of 33,000.

Proponents of the law, which would be the first of its kind in the United States, lobbied residents by distributing a videotape, recorded surreptitiously, in which several Beverly Hills fur salesmen misled a woman posing as a customer, telling her that many animals are killed by lethal injection like dogs or cats.

The consumer group says it is not an extreme animal-rights group trying to ban the sale of furs, but a consumer organization that merely wants to provide information and counter false claims that animals die humanely.

Beverly Hills furriers are furious. Although not denying that many animals die violently for their fur, they say it is unfair to target the retailers of one city.

Douglas Fine, manager of Somper Furs, called the ballot measure “one more attempt by the extreme animal activists to generate publicity to hurt the fur industry.”

Added Keith Kaplan, a spokesman for an association of local retailers: “They have chosen Beverly Hills because it will generate the greatest deal of publicity. This is not about consumer information.”

Mayor Les Bronte--whose city’s ordinances already contain esoteric restrictions governing how many balls can be used on public tennis courts and television noise after 10 p.m.--said he is baffled about how the city would administer such a law.

“I don’t want our police officers going to stores and checking the linings of coats,” he said. “We don’t need a pelt posse here.”

At Somper’s on Tuesday, shopper Markus Bender, a 34-year-old Beverly Hills resident, was sifting through the racks, zeroing in on a $6,000 full-length mink coat, when he learned about the proposed initiative.

“I think it’s ridiculous,” he said. “Are they going to put tags on meat at the grocery store or on my leather shoes? Somewhere you have to draw the line.”

Not far away was William Carothers, a Santa Barbara car broker who was about to buy a fox-trimmed leather coat for his wife for Valentine’s Day.

“I love animals myself, but fur has been worn forever,” he said. “I learned long ago that Bambi no longer runs in the wild.”

The video that proponents of the initiative distributed to solicit signatures proved that retailers lie about the industry, said Luke Montgomery, who helped organize the group. “They give the standard P.R. line that the animals are put to sleep [with injections] like dogs and cats. Not true.”

Retail representative Kaplan acknowledged that the video does show salesmen misinforming a customer.

“They didn’t know the correct answers,” he said. “It would be the same as if you went into a restaurant and asked the waiter how was the fish caught. He wouldn’t necessarily know the answer, but he might know how it was prepared.”

Teresa Platt, executive director of Fur Commission USA, an association representing mink and fox farmers, said the proposed law ignores the fact that there is no law specifically regulating the killing of animals for their fur.

“There is no one size fits all,” she said. “For mink, the preferred method is gas, and for fox it’s injection, but occasionally it is something different.”

The label “lists a variety of methods by which the animals may or may not have been put down,” she added. “Imagine if such a label were required for meat, chicken, fish, medicine--the list is endless.”

Wayne Pacelle, a senior vice president of the Humane Society of the United States, said he supports the proposed law and said that there is no longer any excuse to kill animals for their fur.

“Fur is purely a status symbol, and more and more it is a symbol of cruelty,” he said. “Beverly Hills has a warm climate. The only reason why people would want to wear fur is for the status.”