Landmark Fur Farm Investigation Announced: “The Blueprint”

Posted by Peter Young | 6 comments

Announcing the release of the largest update of fur farm addresses in nearly 15 years.

After five months of research and investigation, I am announcing the release of a landmark document: The Blueprint – the largest update of fur farm addresses in nearly 15 years.

The Blueprint: Fur Farm Intelligence Project Report is the product of a 13,000-mile investigation of over 75% of the fur farms in the country.

The Blueprint is a 62-page supplement to my 10,000-word narrative on the eight-state Fur Farm Intelligence Project investigation, featured in Bite Back Magazine #15.

Included in the 62-page document:

*Massively updated state-by-state fur farm address list

*Photos of nearly 100 mink, fox, and lynx farms.

*Anonymous reports and photos from clandestine visits to fur farms and industry research sites.

*Updated closed farm database.

*Detailed data and status updates on over 200 fur farms.

*Dozens of newly discovered, unpublished fur farm addresses.

I compiled The Blueprint: Fur Farm Intelligence Project Report with the intent of mapping the entire supply-side and infrastructure grid of the industry: from auction houses to feed suppliers, fox farms to research facilities.

The Blueprint contains new addresses and updated data on:

*Fox farms

*Mink farms

*Lynx farms

*Fur industry research farms

*Fur feed suppliers

And much more.

20 years of collected fur farm data has culminated in this document.

The Blueprint can be downloaded here:

The Blueprint PDF download

(large file – allow up to several minutes to open)

Fur Farm Intelligence Project Mission Statement

Mission statement:

The Fur Farm Intelligence Project will compile the largest collection of hard data on fur farms and fur industry infrastructure in nearly 15 years. The Project is an endgame mission to map the entire grid of the industry, with a primary focus on names, addresses, and other actionable data.

The goals:

1) Verify the operational status of every known fur farm (open / closed)

2) Discover locations of unknown farms, research locations, and infrastructure sites.

3) Collect data at each location relevant to legal campaigns: including species seen, farm size, and more.

4) Publicly disclose all data in a single document.

The phases:

Phase One: A two-month road trip to visit, at minimum, 75% of the fur farms in the country.

Phase Two: Research and compilation of all known data on fur industry locations into one hard document, forming the largest body of raw, site-specific data to date.

Phase Three: Three: The public release of all compiled data in one document titled The Blueprint.

Full Narrative Featured in the New Bite Back Magazine

The Blueprint is a supplement to my 10,000-word narrative of the two-month roadwork phase of the Fur Farm Intelligence Project. What follows is an excerpt from the introduction.

In 1997, I left home with a list of fur farm addresses and drove across the country collecting notes on the U.S. fur industry. Those notes were confiscated by the FBI, I was sent to prison, and the notes were never made public.

In 2009, I organized a resurrection: a two-month road trip to every fur farm in the western U.S. The goal: compile the largest collection of raw fur industry data to date. I drafted a budget. Bite Back magazine wrote a check. And the Fur Farm Intelligence Project came to life.

I recruited Daisy as a road trip partner. We spent two months scanning satellite images in fur farming regions. We cross-referenced every fur farm address collection. We assembled a binder of maps. We compiled lists of unverified addresses mined from media reports, fur industry literature, and the word-of-mouth stream. Then we left on the Fur Farm Intelligence Project (FFIP), a mission to document and verify 75% of the fur farms in the U.S.

Resurrection

My return trip would be absent the felonies, with an investigative scope never before attempted. Our goal was a complete blueprint of the fur industry. Every farm address, its operational status (open / closed), and every infrastructure target verified and mapped.

In the years since my first trip, the lynx pens of Fraser Fur Farm and sprawling prison of Short’s Fur Farm festered in the darkest part of my psyche. And in those years, I plotted my return. A return to those Iowa dirt roads and Montana trails; a return to the farms. After staring thousands of animals in the eye only to walk away, I would return on their behalf.

This time, I would not be giving them freedom under darkness. And while anything less is to fail them, this investigation was no less crucial to winning their freedom.

Operation Bite Back Until Today: Fur Farm Data in the 2000s

The sum of the fur farm addresses we have today are found in two sources: The Final Nail #3 (2008), and TheFinalNail.com; both built from the original fur farm list, The Final Nail #1 (1996). Yet outside of A.L.F. raids, the “open” or “closed” status of each farm has never been verified. Central to our mission was this goal: providing the first operational-status update of known fur farms in 13 years.

Investigations into hard data on fur industry (as distinct from its treatment of animals) have taken many forms. The Coalition to Abolish Fur Farms released bulletins in the early-90’s revealing for the first time addresses of fur farms and internal industry research documents. Rod Coronado infiltrated the Seattle Fur Exchange (now American Legend) in the early 1990s. An activist also infiltrated the International Mink Show in 1994, publishing an article on the information he gathered in the Militant Vegan #5. Illegal operations with data collection as their primary or secondary motive included Operation Bite Back (where addresses of fur farms were removed from labs), and the Hawkeye Mink Cooperative break-in (thousands of documents confiscated).

Coordinative Outreach and the Actionability of the Address

While past fur industry investigations focused on the treatment of animals, this one sought something else: names and addresses. Of all forms of animal rights outreach, the dissemination of “names and addresses” is at once among the most overlooked, and most potent. To understand the power of the name and address, one most accept a distinction between actionable info, and unactionable.

That which is actionable is information that serves as an immediate call to action. Unactionable data is informative, but offers no clear “next step”. A “Why Vegan” pamphlet is actionable: the reader can become vegan. Information becomes less useful the further it moves from being something that can be acted on in an immediate way. A philosophical tome on the socio-economic roots of animal exploitation may be informative, but brings with it no call for action. For outreach to be useful, it must incite.

An address gives injustice a fixed physical location, and confronts the reader with the obligation that comes with that knowledge. More than knowing of injustice, it is knowing where. The “next step” could be a protest or undercover investigation, but an address brings the burden of action.

The Parameters

Any breach of property lines to obtain info for a very public project would subject our team to possible criminal prosecution, and defy the instructions of the project’s financial backers. All information would be gathered from public space.

To confirm farms the hard way, we brought tools: Soundpro II unidirectional microphone (to pick up sounds of mink from a distance); military grade digital binoculars; old fur farm address lists; a list of new, unconfirmed addresses; digital camera; and video camera.

Scale-Based Strategy and Blueprints as Bullets

Above the equally horrific meat, dairy, and egg industries, intelligence gathering on the fur industry has a special significance. In 2009, the industry has shrunk to fewer than 350 supply-end sites. Fewer than 350 physical locations form the sole architecture of the entire fur industry. We have arrived at the stage the entire industry can be mapped into one concise blueprint. While a blueprint assists construction, it brings equal utility to deconstruction.

The Architecture of Avarice

The current farm and support structure of the U.S. fur industry (numbers approximate):

Processors / wholesalers / etc: numbers unknown.

Mink farms: 274

Feed suppliers: 12

Equipment suppliers (cages, etc): 10

Research farms: 5

Auction houses: 1

That is it. And the end of the industry does not require the erasure of every target, only their support structure. The further one moves upstream, the higher-impact the target. 274 farms are supported by only a very small and vulnerable support-base of research farms and feed suppliers. A comprehensive industry map, with details of its supply and support structure, allowed an immeasurably greater ability to identify the weaknesses that would bring its collapse.

Were you, tonight, to pore over a list of thousands of chicken farms, chicken slaughterhouses, chicken feed producers, chicken research labs, and chicken distributors, it would be impossible to identify anything you could do that moment to remove a pillar from the industry and bring it measurably closer to collapse. In the fur industry, such pillars number in the low-dozens.

The fur industry is on the losing end of the scale / absorption quotient, whereby the effect of any one action is inversely proportional to an industry’s mass. In a large industry, no one target takes on major significance in the supply network – there is always another target that fulfills the same role, and quickly absorbs any business from a decommissioned building or bankrupt processor.

The fur industry is the opposite. Farms generally have only one choice for specialized feed. Industry research sites number at approximately five. Farms rely on breeding stock with genetic lines that are irreplaceable. From every angle, the industry is weak.

The fur industry is among the most vulnerable targets in our sights. We rented a car, and set out to create the roadmap to its collapse…

Read the full narrative of the two-month, 8-state Fur Farm Intelligence Project investigation in Bite Back magazine #15.

-Peter Young

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