BLOOD AND FUR

By Christine Gorman

The raid on Rick Arritola's mink farm in Mount Angel, Ore., was carried out with military precision. Working under cover of darkness, a small group of antifur activists cut through a wire-mesh fence, pepper-sprayed a watchdog, bypassed an alarm system, opened cages and set free as many as 10,000 scurrying animals, most of them destined to be made into sleek, high-priced fur coats. It was a daring act of ecovandalism, perhaps the largest illegal animal release in U.S. history.

It may also have been the dumbest. Most of the mink were babies--many of them unweaned and unable to live for long without their mother. The rest were typically ornery, aggressive adult mink that had been raised in captivity and didn't know enough to scatter into the hills. Instead, they fought and killed one another. By the end of last week, according to Arritola, some 2,000 of the infants had perished and at least 400 of his 1,600 adult females were missing or dead.

The botched deliverance was the latest of 25 attacks on American mink farms in the past 18 months. It was an "act of love," declared the Animal Liberation Front, a shadowy activist group that took responsibility for the raid in a communique issued late last week. "Contrary to the lies of the popular media," the A.L.F. claimed, "no animals are harmed in any act of liberation."

The Dallas-based Coalition to Abolish the Fur Trade was somewhat more restrained. "Even if some of them died," says founder J.P. Goodwin, "at least they had a shot at freedom." That's true, says Bruce Coblentz, a professor of wildlife biology at Oregon State University in Corvallis. Coblentz allows that a few of the animals may survive in the wild. But the rest, he says, will just "die a different death than they would have otherwise."

--By Christine Gorman