Fur and the right

Janet Albrechtsen has written a piece justifying her buying a fur coat in Canada by using a spurious Green argument put forward by the Canadian Fur industry. Their argument states that producing a fake fur coat made out of oil byproducts is a greenhouse contributor as opposed to using real fur which is apparently 'natural'. This argument of course ignores the climate impact of fur farms (for feeding, housing, transporting, killing, skinning and rendering animals) and the production of the coat, which when taken in total would make the fake fur coat both environmentally as well as morally greatly superior.

Albretchsen is just one of Australia's rightist opinion writers and bloggers, the most popular being Tim Blair, who routinely attack vegetarians and animal rightists.

This is a shame as animal rights does not otherwise have to be part of the left/right divide.

In Australia all the early vegetarian MPs were in the Liberal Party, and were afforded little problem over it. Even in the 1970s there were Liberals at the birth of the Animal Liberation movement in Australia. However the foundation of the Democrats by disaffected Liberals, seems to have stripped the Party of most of its vegetarian supporters, and the rise of Green politics continued that shift. On the Left and amongst environmentalist politicians vegetarianism has almost never been found. Certainly the current leading politicians Peter Garrett, Penny Wong and Bob Brown aren't giving up meat.

Which leaves the question, now that the Democrats seem to have disappeared from the political map, where will the generally conservative vegetarian and animal rights supporting voters go.