Mink Farms

From the Chronicle Herald
by Daniel Mills

30 lashes for vanity!


Sun. Nov 1 - 4:45 AM
Last Sunday’s "Mink ranchers feed craze" has dazed me into a new admiration for the lowly mink and its capacity to restore new blinking eyelashes to yesterday’s women: Lo, Mo and O (J-Lo, Madonna and Oprah). I can see their beady little eyes now (the mink, I mean), rolled towards the heavens in awe of a new and purposeful role — no longer furs to warm the "bods" of the rich and affluent and bonnets for their hair (for that, they have to lay down their lives), but under the gentle hand of their keepers, a mere brushing to extract fur to improve "winkability" of the rich and famous whose own lashes, for reasons of age I suspect, have fallen out. God forbid that they would look their age, let alone act it!

Lee Keating wonders aloud why the Department of Agriculture "is so hot on mink ranching." The article indicates a mink ranch is planned for Carleton, Yarmouth County; although an Oct. 28 update says it cannot proceed unless the building’s size is reduced. Also mentioned in Sunday’s article is that Ashmore in Digby County has been graced by our benevolent politicos with a mink farm. It may be because concerned Digby Neck people have been so vocal about so many issues the past few years that mention of a mink operation on Digby Neck on the Cross Road seems to have escaped the writer’s pen. Why, even our own MLA knew nothing about it until one of us mentioned it to him not so long ago!

The owner of a Florida salon, Robin Chadwick, "swears by them" and said she got raves for wearing them! She sells "tons" of the mink eyelashes for between $100 and $250 a set. They are bought up in bulk!

Mink farming will grow by leaps and bounds. Young mink, usually skinned when they’re of age to produce the maximum amount of fur, will live longer. PETA and I can be grateful for that. But the poor little buggers will be rubbed with fur-growing concoctions regularly to expedite the manufacture of eyelashes, probably accompanied by daily brushing of their fur.

It’s hard to believe, but that’s how vain is the world which most of us read about or see on TV.


Daniel Mills, Digby