Cruel conditions revealed on a fox fur farm in Raciborsk, near Wieliczka.
Seventeen foxes were rescued by the Open Cages Association.
The foxes will be taken care of by animal shelters all over Poland.

POLAND, 3 APRIL 2017 – The end of March, an animal welfare organization in Cracow discovered a small fox farm along with an illegal puppy mill. Foxes were being bred in extremely small cages and it was obvious that the farm did not meet the already low requirements for breeding fur animals. Polish Fur Free Alliance member Open Cages was notified and rescued the seventeen foxes from the cruel conditions on the farm in Raciborskowho. In 2015 Open Cages rescued two crippled foxes from a farm in Kościan in 2015and last year rescued two foxes that were then taken care of by Poznań Zoo. This is the first time that so many animals were rescued from a fur farm in Poland in once.

Watch the video here:

The foxes rescued by the association were brought to safe places all around Poland: the Animal Shelter in Korabiewice run by Viva Foundation, Przystań Ocalenie (Rescue Haven) in Tychy, the Centre for Rehabilitation of Wild Animals in Jelonki, the Old Zoo in Poznań, and the S.O.S. Foundation Animal Shelter. Cooperation between the animal protection organizations and animal care centres was crucial to ensure that such a large number of animals were given the opportunity to be relocated in animal care facilities adapted to taking care of animals with special needs. “On site we encountered exhausted animals, which had spent all their lives in cages, barely able to move. To be honest, they had more luck than the foxes kept in slightly bigger but regulatory cages, because in late fall, they will be skinned and their fur will be sold. The foxes removed from Raciborsko are going to spend the rest of their lives under the care of responsible guardians”.

The Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development’s executive order requires a space of only 0.6 m² to be allocated to each individual fox in a breeding facility. The animal farm in Raciborsko did not even meet these strikingly low requirements, and it was only due to this fact that it was possible to remove the animals. Each year in Poland, approximately one hundred thousand foxes and raccoon dogs and around 8–10 million mink are bred and killed in similar, though larger, animal farms. In November 2016, the Open Cages Association submitted a petition to the Polish Parliament to ban the breeding of canines for fur. A draft amendment to the Animal Protection Act is being drawn up by the Parliamentary Friends of Animals Team, which is intended to ban all breeding of animals for fur. According to the polls commissioned by Open Cages, 67% of Poles support such changes.

The priority of the intervention was to safely accommodate the rescued foxes. However, based on collected evidence, the association intends to report the matter to the Prosecutor’s Office as a suspected criminal offense.