Fur-Free Europe: Share Your Opinion with the EU Now
The next step for the European Commission is to assess the views of stakeholders before a final decision is made on a possible ban on fur farming and the fur trade across the entire European Union.
On 4 July, the European Commission launched a call for evidence for a fur-free Europe, allowing stakeholders to submit evidence or positions for four weeks.
The European Citizens' Initiative Fur Free Europe, which ran from 2022 to 2023 and collected over 1’500’000 valid signatures, calls on the EU to ban fur farms and the placing of farmed fur products on the European market.
In December 2023, the European Commission published an official response to the initiative, outlining several scenarios to be examined, including a possible ban on fur farms and the placing of farmed fur products on the European market, or alternatively other measures.
According to the Commission, calls for evidence are used to define the scope of a “politically sensitive and/or important new law or policy.” In the context of Fur Free Europe, the data collected will be used to quantify the impacts of the identified scenarios at all levels of the fur industry, including social, economic and environmental data.
In addition to the call for evidence, the Commission is awaiting an opinion from the European Food Safety Authority to inform its final decision. The opinion is expected to be published in July.
Stakeholders have until 1 August to submit their feedback here.
More on the subject of recreational hunting: The scientific evidence is presented in the overview Studies on the Effects of Recreational Hunting.
The position of IG Wild beim Wild: IG Wild beim Wild rejects recreational hunting. Our model is the canton of Geneva, which has managed without recreational hunting since 1974: without hunting seasons, without hunting dogs, without driven hunts, without high seats, without the animal cruelty and crime that go hand in hand with hunting season elsewhere. What has worked there for over fifty years disproves every position paper by JagdSchweiz. An association that bases its policy on claims it refutes in its own documents is not a professional organisation, but a factory for misinformation.
