First published November 13, 2020.
The planned killing of 17 million mink in Denmark has been halted after opposition from the Danish parliament. (As events turned out, this was a pause of a few days rather than the end of the cull: on 10 November 2020 the government backed down, at least for the time being, under pressure that included the parliamentary opposition, but the culling went ahead later that month. The details are below.) The planned cull of the animals was to be carried out in order to stop the spread of a mutated form of the coronavirus, which has been found in the mink population. It is feared that the new mutation may not be stopped by the vaccines currently being developed.
The leader of Denmark's largest opposition party opposed the move on the basis that they believed that the culling did not have a basis in scientific fact. Jakob Ellemann-Jensen, the party's leader, said:
"Massive doubts over whether this cull is properly scientifically based [have] come to light now. At the same time the government is taking away the livelihood of a large number of people without actually having the legal rights to do so."
The party based their opposition also on the fact that the mutated strain has not been found in the Danish mink population for over a month.
An animal-rights campaigner quoted in press coverage at the time welcomed the halt, but argued that it owed little to concern for the animals, since most of them were about to be killed for their fur anyway. According to the statement as reported, the cull could be paused:
"Mainly because the ongoing pelting season means most animals, other than breeding stock, are already being killed. This is a tiny sector, we could easily live without it, given the risk of compromising a vaccine. We should be shutting down mink farms and culling all the animals. Sick animals are not being treated which is another mink welfare issue."
CoVid-19 outbreaks among mink have been recorded in the United States, Spain and Sweden, who have all carried out small scale culls of their own. Animal rights activists have long protested the fact that these intelligent animals are bred in captivity and killed solely for their use in clothing. This includes the production of accessories such as fake eyelashes.
Joanna Swabe, senior director of public affairs at Humane Society International (HSI profile), was quoted in The Guardian at the time on the mink and their conditions in captivity:
"Mink, who are already stressed from the unnatural living conditions, experience severe respiratory distress before dying. If mink on a farm are infected, suffering respiratory problems and are not being culled, their welfare will also be seriously compromised. So far it's just luck that we are talking about mink rather than food animals. Covid-19 can mutate in mink, which a virus can do anyway, and then it can potentially come back to us. What if we get a zoonotic disease that affects pigs in the next pandemic? Or chickens? Mink can easily be culled, they are non-essential. It's going to be harder to do that with food-animals."
At the time of writing, in mid-November 2020, recent vaccine developments had led to the belief that the pandemic may soon be curtailed. Governments across the world were then preparing to roll out vaccines as soon as possible.
What happened after the pause: the law, the resignation and the inquiry
The dispute involved two separate questions: whether the government had the legal authority to order every mink killed, and whether the scientific case for doing so was strong enough. The pause described above did not settle either one, and the word “stopped” in this article’s first headline described only a few days in November 2020.
The order and the legal problem. The cull was extended to the whole country on 4 November 2020, and two days later the government acknowledged that the nationwide order had been given without legal authority. The warning behind it came from the State Serum Institute (SSI), which said that in the worst case the mink variant, known as Cluster 5, could start a second pandemic and weaken vaccines then in development. On 17 November the minority government secured parliamentary backing to give the cull a legal basis after the fact, and the agriculture minister, Mogens Jensen, resigned, saying his ministry had made a mistake, while the cull of the remaining animals continued towards its deadline.
The variant. On 19 November the Danish health ministry said Cluster 5 was very probably extinct, as no case had been detected since 15 September — consistent with the opposition’s point, quoted above, that the strain had not been seen for more than a month. Scientists remained divided: UCL geneticist Francois Balloux told The Guardian that concerns about Cluster 5 may have been overestimated, but that the cull was not unjustified because so many mink were infected and formed a large reservoir of the virus.
The ban and the industry. In December 2020 parliament banned mink keeping until the end of 2021; the ban was later extended by a year and expired on 1 January 2023. By then the sector had largely gone: about 1,243 farmers had applied for compensation for closing down, against only 15 who applied for the package that would let them restart. The compensation bill was expected to reach £1.8bn–£2.2bn, and the government also announced that four million buried mink carcasses would be dug up and burned because of environmental concerns.
The Mink Commission. In its report of 30 June 2022, the parliamentary Mink Commission found that there had been no legal authority to require all mink to be killed, and that Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen’s statements at the 4 November press conference were objectively grossly misleading, although she had not known the legal basis was missing. It said ten officials should be held accountable, and found that Jensen had been told of the problem on 5 November. The commission did not assess the health or veterinary case for the cull. Parliament formally reprimanded Frederiksen in July 2022 but did not pursue an impeachment case, and the affair contributed to the snap general election later that year.
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