Even in freezing weather billionaire’s wives on this continent rarely show themselves in public any longer in fur coats. The animal rights movement has successfully intimidated even them. It would be nice to know whether oligarch’s wives in Russia have yielded to the same pressure and whether the incidence of men, rich or poor, wearing fur caps is now as low in Minsk as it is in Toronto. Canada would still be firmly in the hands of our native people if similar pressures had prevented British and French fur traders from colonizing the continent.
And Russian fur traders. Many of us have forgotten, or never knew, that they were here, too. In the early 19th century, fur trappers with the Russian-American Company of the tsarist empire, based on the same principles as the Hudson’s Bay Company and the Dutch East India Company, conducted explorations down the west coast, presumably including the coast of British Columbia, from trading settlements in Alaska and the Aleutians, hunting for sea otter pelts as far south as San Diego. In August 1812, the company set up a fortified trading post at Fort Ross, near present-day Bodega Bay in Northern California, sixty miles north of San Francisco. It is now a museum. This colony was active until the Russians departed in 1841.
No, they did not leave because they were prescient about environmental pressures causing the decline of the demand for sea otters a hundred and fifty years later. They left for other reasons – maybe they were pushed.
But had they stayed, Sarah Palin could have said, in her former home in Alaska, “I can see Russia looking east – or south.”
Eric Koch’s book, The Weimar Triangle, is available at Indigo-Chapters and in your local bookstore. 
Hence, the Russian River
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_River_(California)
which empties into the Pacific Ocean at Jenner, just North of Bodega Bay. Wikipedia mentions the Russian trappers who explored the river in the early 19th century, and established Fort Ross 10 miles northwest of its mouth. “They called it the Slavianka River, which means ‘Slav woman’.” Nowadays the area is a popular tourist area for outdoor sports and wineries:
http://www.russianrivertravel.com/
Nobody intimidates the oligarchs. When I was in Europe about a year ago, it was the oligarchs wifes or girlfriends who walked around in huge fur coats. Nothing is as warm as fur and artificial fur is made from oil products. I still prefer fur.
This is a subject rife for hypocrisy.
Unless we’re vegetarians and also eschew leather shoes, hats and gloves, opposing the wearing of fur seems irrational.
If fur-bearing animals are not killed in painful traps, skinned alive, or slaughtered in numbers that threaten their survival, fur seems like a benign environmentally-friendly way to keep warm.
However, that may be an example of “speciesism”, the belief that some animals (homo sapiens for example) are superior to or worth more than others and have the inherent right to do to other animals what they wouldn’t do to their own kind.