“While the public have been quick to criticize, business insiders and zoologists argue that the cruelty only exists on a small number of farms and is not typical of rabbit husbandry practices in China.”*

Here is a fascinating video about the Angora Rabbit fiber production business as done in France. A friend, Kristen, is working on making an English transcript for it, and I will ask her permission to post it here when she has it finished.

Intrigued by this video, I did some googling and came across this article (http://goo.gl/Fr9o5m) on the website of a company owned by twin sisters in Turkey, that manufactures garments and yarns from Angora fiber. It mentions LagodendronR, a feed that is given to Angora rabbits in commercial operations that works as a depilatory to cause the wool to loosen in the same way it does when rabbits molt naturally. This facilitates quick and painless plucking of the wool as shown in the video.

I suspect that the rabbit shown in the notorious PETA video may have been given such a depilatory, but that it was not quite ready to be plucked, and that the worker was offered a financial incentive to pluck the rabbit as roughly as possible for the video. PETA’s own conduct has not been free of criticism: http://www.petakillsanimals.com/

The article mentions something I had not thought much about before, and that is the ‘why’ of how the Angoras’ fur grows so long: “Angora hair is unusually long owing to the prolongation of the active phase of the hair follicle cycle…” Angoras owe this ability to a double recessive of the gene “l.” In a normal furred rabbit, which is dominant, we use the code “LL.” Angoras are “ll.”

This recent article* reveals that the notorious PETA Chinese Angora cruelty video has, indeed, hurt the majority of ethical Angora producers along with the unethical minority, “Most farmers do not pull fur out of live rabbits because they will be more likely to become ill or die from infection or mosquito bites, said Qian Qingxiang of the China Animal Agriculture Association.”

Update 7 January 2014:
Article on the South China Morning Post about the PETA investigation and its effect on the Angora farmers.