The announcement was made by the prime minister on 4 November and, less than a week later, it is already taking place: there are millions of minks to be slaughtered in Denmark. The decision was made after being A mutation of the new coronavirus was found in the animals, which infected 214 people. “Mutation of the virus via mink may create the risk that the future vaccine will not work as it should (…). It is necessary to slaughter all mink”, Said Mette Frederiksen, at a press conference.
Reuters visited some mink production farms and photographed the slaughter process, which began immediately after the announcement. The first images were taken on 6 November, two days after the decision; this monday, the news agency captured the mink to be buried in a mass grave located on military ground. But in October there were records of animal slaughter, as shown in some pictures in this photo gallery. The decision has drawn harsh criticism from people in the industry, but also lawmakers, who claim the decision was illegal, also raising questions about the scientific evidence that motivated it. The Government has already admitted that it had no legal basis for the measure and is hastily drafting legislation to support the decision.
This Monday, Environment and Food Minister Mogens Jensen sent an email to Reuters where he regretted the “lack of transparency” in the process. Jensen said the government would move ahead with “emergency legislation” to support the slaughter order – even though the opposition has warned that it would not allow a draft to replace what usually results from a 30-day legislative process. On Tuesday, the Danish Veterinary and Food Administration apologized to the mink producers in a letter, but said it continued to recommend slaughter.
Opposition parties argue that the slaughter of healthy mink should not have started before compensation plans for workers and owners of the country’s 1100 farms come into effect. Tage Pederson, responsible for the Danish association of mink breeders, warned producers to continue slaughter, despite doubts as to its legality, and warned that the industry – which employs 6,000 people and exports mink fur worth 800 million dollars annually – it was over.
Following this decision, also in Poland, mink, farm workers and their families will be tested. The population of these animals in Poland must, however, account for only half of Denmark’s 17 million. “The priority is to check the health status of the animals on the farms,” the Polish Minister of Agriculture said in a statement sent to Reuters. Polish veterinary authorities reported that they had tests and infrastructure in place for this control since May, but did not specify what type of tests had already been carried out, or whether they had already been carried out. Some mink farm representatives claim that tests have indeed been carried out – and that they have shown no covid-19 infection – while others said the tests had not taken place. Asked about tests and potential infections in the mink, the inspection body told the news agency that “there were no identified cases”, without giving further details about the case.
“We all know that this virus does not exist on Polish farms,” said Tadeusz Jakubowski, a veterinarian and director of the Polish Association of Breeders and Producers of Fur Animals. “I suspect that someone is using the coronavirus as a pretext to devastate breeding in Denmark, without a scientific reason,” he shot. The non-governmental organization Otwarte Klatki asked for normal testing of covid-19 for Polish mink: “It is difficult to believe that the problem will not appear in Poland sooner or later. Perhaps it already exists, but we don’t know,” said Pawel Rawicki. The country is, together with Denmark and China, one of the main producers of mink globally. About 60 million are killed annually in the three countries, estimates the UK’s Humane Society International.
Denmark is not, however, the first country to make this decision. In July, the Aragon region, in Spain decreed the killing of almost 100 thousand mink, after 80% of these animals have been infected with the new coronavirus. The measure was a way of “avoiding risks to the population and public health”, justified Joaquin Olona, Minister of Agriculture of the region at the time. In the same month, but a few weeks earlier, the Netherlands that have taken the same action: about 10,000 were slaughtered.
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