Faux Hnting

1740faux/450 words

January 16, 2017

Faux Hunting

A column by

Harley L. Sachs

When our family was in the fur business my father sold coats made from many animals. Mom had an ocelot jacket and a mink stole. I had once had a cut down raccoon coat. But we also sold Labrador seal, sheered beaver, Coney, an occasional squirrel coat, mouton lamb, almost any animal whose hide leant it to making into a coat for humans. Lions were too shaggy, but leopards were fine for coats. Mink was raised on farms just for the hides. Sable was trapped in Siberia. I suspect zebra would be too difficult to match up, what with all those stripes. Arctic fox was often sold as a scarf with a fake animal head clasp complete with glass eyes. You could even get moleskin, though it would take an awful lot of dead moles to make a ladies jacket.

Animal rights fanatics are full of beans, total hypocrites.. A cowboy wouldn’t want a plastic saddle. Saddles need to be leather.  As for the cruelty of killing an animal for its skin, in the Argentine cattle were initially raised only for their hides until they figured out that the meat could be turned into corned beef. Leather or pigskin shoes are just an animal skin with the hair removed. Shaving and pastry brushes are made of pig bristles..

Coming from that fur business background, I was stymied by the label on my new, lined boots. The label says “faux fur.” So what animal is a faux? Not a fox, too shaggy for a boot liner, and not mink, too expensive. We used to sell seal dyed Coney, a Coney being a sort of rabbit and dyed to look like seal. It was still basically rabbit.

But a faux? What animal was that?

It couldn‘t be very large, and being a mammal had to be something with four legs.

I’d heard about fox hunting, but not faux hunting.

I’d never seen a faux in the zoo, either.

Maybe the faux is something like the nauga whose hide is made into furniture. I haven’t seen naugas at the zoo, either but plenty of recliners using naugahide..

Maybe, like the Coney, those animal  skins are processed to suit the technological world we live in.  Seal dyed Coney was just a fake. Maybe the faux is, too. Maybe faux fur is really guinea pig, those cute cuddly creatures that are not actually pigs. A Coney is not a seal even if dyed that color, and a guinea pig isn’t a pig. Nobody would want to kill a guinea pig for boot liner, so they give it another name, faux. So maybe a faux is something else. Go figure.