Sunday, December 24, 2006

when faux is not so

oh, diddy!

The Humane Society of the United States yesterday released the results of a mass spectrometry test conducted on a Sean John hooded snorkel jacket that was originally labeled as having an imitation rabbit-fur collar.

The label inside the jacket claimed that the collar was made from "raccoon fur."

The Humane Society determined that both labels were wrong and that the fur on the jacket actually comes from a canine called a raccoon dog, a small member of the dog family indigenous to East Asia.

The animal gets its name because its coat is similar to a raccoon's. However, the raccoon dog is no more closely related to the raccoon than any other dog.

naturally diddy claims he didn't know, and i imagine he probably didn't. you would think that faux fur would be cheaper than real fur, and thus this kind of thing wouldn't happen, but perhaps synthetic is not always cheaper than cheap chinese dog fur, which i can imagine would be pretty cheap.

"First these jackets were falsely advertised as faux fur, and then it turned out that the fur came from a type of dog," said Wayne Pacelle, president and CEO of the Humane Society. All too often, fur labeled as faux turns out to come from dogs or cats, added Pacelle, who called it an "industry-wide problem."

"Retailers and designers aren't paying close enough attention to composition of the fur trim they are selling," he said. "It's especially problematic when the fur is sourced from China, where domestic dogs and cats and raccoon dogs are killed in gruesome ways, even skinned alive."

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