Under any circumstances, a large number of fashion-self-conscious females will never wear fur — some for economic reasons and others for the “ick” factor. If you’re a committed vegan or have taken a vow of poverty, it’s likely that nothing anyone has to say about the ethics of fur will ever matter much to you. 

For everyone else, here’s a practical question: Since the primary knock on fur has to do with a perception that the animals are treated badly, what would happen if the fur trade itself were to create an incentive for animal welfare to improve across the board? 

Animal-rights advocates have always claimed that a lack of oversight and regulation has resulted in a “race to the bottom” – a pelt is a pelt, in other words, no matter how it was obtained. But what if there were a race to the top instead? 

Granted, it would still be fur. For some, that would still spell ten kinds of insurmountable trouble. But the shrillest critics of fur in fashion might find themselves with a bit less to complain about and would have a harder time poking holes in the idea of raising animals for their fur – the way nobody really carps about the welfare of free-range chickens. 

In fact, the fur industry has been quietly doing this for the last two years. They call it “Origin Assured.” I called up the International Fur Trade Federation (IFTF) here in Great Britain last week, and the basic program was explained to me.

In a nutshell, it’s a hang-tag and a label sewn into a fur garment that signifies that the animal you’re wearing was raised according to European Union animal-welfare and slaughter directives (or whatever the applicable laws are in Canada, the U.S., etc.). It means no more guessing games about where your fur has come from. 

The tags and labels travel with a pelt as it moves from an auction house to a buyer, and then to garment manufacturers, wholesalers, retailers, and ultimately consumers. No one can put Origin Assured markings on a fur coat unless every square millimeter of fur in the garment qualified for the program. And an independent trade-inspection company has been hired to double-check that the designation isn’t showing up on unapproved coats.

If you’re hoping to take granny’s floor-length mink to a fur auction to have it retroactively “Origin Assured,” by the way, you’re out of luck. There’s no telling how that coat was made. Even your grandmother didn’t know. 

Of course, there’s a neat profit motive in any business re-branding itself in a more ethical light through the use of an eco-label. Some might even say that’s why eco-labels were invented. But I’ve always thought that the motivation matters less than the endgame. 

If Cadbury wants to claim greater virtue by purchasing less cocoa from countries with horrible records of child labor, so be it. The outcome is marvelous. The same goes for corporate monoliths trying to burnish their images with green-energy initiatives. We should all care less about their intentions than their results.

With this thought in mind, the IFTF noted that Chinese fur farms have not qualified for the Origin Assured program. Given China’s track record, that alone should make animal-rights groups happy. And maybe the professional anti-fur sector is privately encouraged by an effort by mink, fox, and chinchilla suppliers to collectively raise the animal-welfare bar. So I rang a few animal groups last month during a visit to the United States, just to find out.

Friends of Animals, a charity in Connecticut, told me, “There’s still no excuse for it. The industry is pretending that buying fur from one country instead of another is like choosing fancy shade-grown coffee. But the whole industry is still based on horrible cruelty.”

PETA, predictably, went for the rhetorical: “You’re joking, right? The fur industry is policing itself, and we’re supposed to throw them a parade? Not a chance. We’ll jump for joy when the whole fur industry is gone for good. And they’re on their way out.”

Likewise, the Humane Society of the United States thought fur was on the ropes globally: “We remain committed to a world free of needless cruelty to animals for the sake of fashion, and furriers are just calling cruelty by another name in an attempt to prolong their dying industry.”

However, calling it a “dying industry” is inaccurate. As one of the world’s oldest commodities, fur has always been buffeted by the cyclical whims of the global economy. Its fortunes have more ups and downs than Labour Party poll numbers. Like it or not, I think, fur is here to stay. And provided it keeps its integrity intact, the Origin Assured program could be just what fur needs to become a 21st-Century commodity instead of a 21st-Century casualty. 

The ground may have shifted beneath animal activists’ feet while they weren’t paying attention. The old binary choice, between fur and no fur, now has a middle ground: “responsible” fur. Unless this new paradigm falls apart, it’s going to be hard to argue against it and sound reasonable.

The fur trade knows that it’s just a matter of time before everything hitting the fashion runways will be evaluated for its ethical footprint. And they don’t want to be behind the curve.

Just think: If fur had an eco-label thirty years ago, would PETA have made a name for itself ticking off Anna Wintour?