Fur coats are in the middle of a fashion comeback

Three years ago, I was being fitted for my wedding dress when the designer suddenly produced a white fox-fur stole out of nowhere and draped it around my shoulders as a dramatic finishing touch.

I have always thought that fur is beautiful, but even then I had qualms about the ethics of wearing it and wondered where it had come from.

'Oh, it was probably a wild fox,' said the designer casually.

There was something undeniably indulgent and luxurious about wearing that fur on my wedding day, and whenever I looked at it in my wardrobe afterwards, I felt a certain guilt, given the care I take in sourcing my produce in my work as a chef.

Recently, however, I had an experience which made me feel physically sick every time I saw or touched it.

That experience was making a documentary for Channel 4 about the fur trade  -  an extraordinary venture which would see me gaining unprecedented access to a fur farm, take me animal trapping in the American wilderness and subject me to images of suffering which changed my views on wearing fur for ever.

I was first approached about this programme following an earlier documentary I had made for the BBC about chicken farming.

As a chef, I am careful to use only free-range meat, but I understand that single mums with four kids to feed need a cheaper alternative to the expensive organic and free range options.

My argument was that there should be a middle ground  -  various other welfare improvements which would improve a chicken's lot without making it prohibitively expensive  -  and it was with the same open mind that I approached my investigation into the booming fur trade.

Fur is in the middle of a comeback  -  on the catwalks, in magazines and on the High Street.

Today, around 400 designers use fur, compared with only 45 in 1985, and the fur industry is worth Ł500 million a year in Britain alone  -  and a staggering Ł7 billion worldwide.

As I discovered for myself, fur no longer has the same shock value it did 20 years ago, when you risked verbal abuse and even physical attack if you dared wear it in public.

As an experiment, I was lent a full-length mink coat to wear when we began filming.

Nervously venturing out on to the streets of London, I was surprised to find that it didn't attract a single negative reaction  -  even when I stopped people and told them what I was wearing.

This change in attitude is perhaps not surprising given the endorsement of many celebrities who wear fur openly and with pride.

Given this new acceptance, and the sheer scale of the industry, there seems little point in hoping it will go away, so I wondered if there were ways of making fur more ethical.

Minks across the world are suffering for the multi-million pound fur trade

Anti-fur campaigners have long condemned the industry as barbaric and inhumane, but surely, I thought, there must be good practices as well as bad.

If we could encourage the former, and warn consumers against the latter, then perhaps we could take some of the guilt out of wearing fur.

And in theory, why should the wearing of humanely sourced fur  -  from a regulated industry  -  be any different from wearing clothes made out of leather?

I had hoped the British fashion industry might co-operate, but I was to be disappointed.

I asked more than 100 British designers to talk on camera about their use of fur, but all declined, such was their fear of reprisals from the anti-fur lobby.

To get the industry's side of the story, I had to travel to Denmark where the Scandinavian fur industry has been busy courting designers by sponsoring their collections and encouraging them to work with fur.

This intensive drive to get their products into shops led me to hope that I might persuade at least one company to show me how animals live and die on a fur farm.

After intense negotiations, and with two PR minders watching our every move, we were allowed to film  -  for the first time  -  a farm where 20,000 mink every year are killed for their pelts.

It all seemed surprisingly humane, the mink raised in cages which were small but gave them at least some room to move around in before they were gassed with carbon dioxide.

I had expected lots of blood and screaming, but it all felt quite clean and clinical and no part of the animal was wasted.

As someone who works solely with free-range meat, I would never wear fur from mink farmed in this way, but, if you are comfortable with the general idea of wild creatures being kept in cages, then this Hilton of mink farms might well persuade you that mink farming is not as bad as the anti fur campaigners claim.

The one doubt I had was whether this was all just a public relations exercise.

If fur farming can be that humane, why has it been outlawed in the UK?

For a different view, I visited the Nottingham offices of Respect For Animals, a lobby group that wields significant political clout and was instrumental in bringing about a ban on fur farming here.

Its director, Mark Glover, told me that I had indeed seen a highly sanitised version of fur farming and showed me videos shot by undercover campaigners which, he assured me, were far closer to the truth.

The first of these was filmed in a fox farm in America.

Foxes are left in cramped cages, chasing their tails psychotically in never-ending circles

I watched horrified as I saw clearly distressed animals in cramped cages, chasing their tails psychotically in never-ending circles.

I covered my eyes as the camera cut to one fox sitting and trembling in its cage  -  its right leg stripped of its flesh and gnawed to the bone by the other crazed creatures around it.

As Glover explained, the fox furs harvested from these creatures are worth around only Ł30, so the farmers do not waste money on calling out vets, even when the foxes are in such obvious distress.

It was hard to believe that this footage was shot in the U.S., which argues that its industry is very well regulated, but far worse was to come in footage from China, which supplies half of all the world's fur.

This was also shot at a fox farm and I watched horrified as these animals were clubbed, stamped on, or dashed against the ground to subdue them.

Behind bars: A mink stares out of its cage

Then, through my tears, I saw these poor creatures being literally skinned alive.

Afterwards, I found it difficult to erase these awful images from my mind, but still I wondered whether I might find a way to wear fur without a guilty conscience.

Could animals spend their time in the wild and then be killed humanely?

To find out, I went on a remarkable journey to Idaho, where I was taught to lay an animal trap by Vietnam veteran Johnnie Wisenhurst, who makes his living selling beaver pelts to local dealers for up to Ł150 a time, as six generation of his family have done before him.

From his point of view, he is trapping animals from a sustainable and perceived pest population.

Like the rest of the fur trade, trapping is controversial.

Animals have been known to chew their limbs off to escape, so, after setting our trap late one night, I was relieved to find the next morning that it had captured a beaver and killed it outright with no sign of a struggle.

In Idaho, trapping is open to anyone  -  a child as young as 12 can get a licence.

There are good trappers and bad ones.

Johnnie seemed to me to be one of the good guys, taking care not to cause unnecessary suffering to the animals he killed.

The problem for those who buy the myriad furs on the market today is that they have no way of knowing whether they were killed humanely, and the industry itself makes little or no effort to provide such information.

Some furs are 'Origin Assured', which means they come from a regulated country, but regulations vary from country to country and welfare standards can differ dramatically from farm to farm.

Celebrities like supermodel Kate Moss have made the fur-coat a must have fashion garment

One auction house I visited in Denmark handles a third of the world's furs and sorts them not by country of origin, but by colour and quality.

One batch of 2,000 mink furs might contain furs from hundreds of suppliers from all over the world  -  some maintaining high standards of care, some not.

Even the buyers who bid for them do so without any knowledge of their provenance, so what hope does the consumer have of making an ethical choice when it comes to fur?

If they did have more information, would they care?

Unlike the food industry, where growing public concern has brought about improvements in animal welfare and transparency in labelling products, the people who wear fur don't seem to give a damn about how it has been produced.

Without pressure from its customers, the fur industry will remain unregulated and, as long as that is the case, anyone buying fur could be supporting animal cruelty. Is any item of clothing really worth that?

For me, the answer is an emphatic no.

After I had finished filming the documentary, one of the first things I did was cut up the fox stole I had worn at my wedding and throw it away.

KILL IT, Skin It, Wear It is on Channel 4, Sunday, August 10 at 10pm.

By Merrilees Parker
Last updated at 1:23 AM on 09th August 2008