A couple of months ago I inherited some items that had once belonged to my mother. Most of these boxes invoked poignant joy. But one produced a moral dilemma.
I found a collection of fur garments, wrapped in plastic, that my mother had inherited from her mother. This included a fabulous floor-length mink coat of the sort that heiresses once commonly wore around New York or Geneva, and wealthy women still sport in Moscow or Davos.
Should I wear that coat? Toss it away? Just sell it on eBay? Twenty years ago my answer would have been clear: I would have conducted a ritual burning of the mink while enveloped in a smug glow of political correctness. I started my adult life as a tie-dye-wearing anthropology student and back then the animal rights movement was running such a slick anti-fur campaign that mink seemed taboo to westerners of my age. Who can forget those ghastly posters of slaughtered seals? Or the shots of fur-clad ladies being doused in red paint in the streets by angry protesters?
