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This 2015 article is worth reading again now, because the battle against fur – with a large proportion of so-called faux fur being real animal skin – continues, and will continue as long as wearing fur (real, faux, or fake-faux) is fashionable. Leather is part of it, too, because a great deal of skin of animals such as dogs and cats remains on the body after the fur-quality pelt is ripped away, and the ability to turn remnants of skin into soft leather products (and in many cases selling the flesh for meat) makes the raising or gathering and processing of animals into marketable components more profitable than if only the pelts could be sold. The leather industry based on hides produced in slaughterhouses is no less an animal protection concern, and there are similarities with the fur trade, but the slaughterhouse skin industry is a markedly different animal issue than the fur trade. For one thing, skins from slaughterhouses are byproducts of the meat industry, whereas the meat from the fur trade is itself the byproduct. What Madame Bardot says in the 2015 article is essentially what I have been trying to point out for 25 years: that the battle against fur was almost won circa 1990, and because donors weren’t seeing much fur, they weren’t donating as much on this issue. And because most wealthy animal group campaigns follow the money, with a paucity of vision and strategy, the groups – with the exception of PETA and Friends of Animals – stopped campaigning against fur. Brigitte Bardot said, “Pride, stupidity or just plain ignorance have allowed this trend built on the lethal exploitation of animals to flourish once again. This is a war that we had won, or at least that we believed we had won, in the 1990s, since fewer people in Europe and in the US dared to wear real fur.”
https://www.theguardian.com/fashion/2015/jul/10/brigitte-bardot-i-couldnt-wear-lagerfeld-while-feeding-my-goats?CMP=share_btn_fb