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Even in this day and age, more than 110 million animals across the world are killed each year for their fur, according to an animal charity group, Animal Defenders International (ADI). This includes over 15 million foxes killed for fur coats, trinkets and accessories each year.

Using hidden cameras placed in a fur farm in Poland, the fourth largest producer of fox fur in the world, ADI documented the short, brutal lives of three arctic foxes, whom they named Borys, Eryk and Aleska.

The result is the disturbing documentary (above), titled A Lifetime. It follows the lives of the foxes right from their birth on the farm, when their mother still nursed the cubs, and as they grow and take their first steps. Their mother is removed after a few weeks, but the cubs continue to explore their world – a small wire cage – and play together.

The lives of the two brothers is short-lived. They are less than seven months old when they are dragged from their cage and, in spite of desperate attempts to run away, hung by their leg and electrocuted in front of Aleska, their sister. Aleska’s life is spared, for she will breed next year’s foxes.

The charity poignantly states, “This is the real cost of fur – when you buy fur, you buy cruelty.”

ADI’s findings, detailed comprehensively in this report, reveal “a cruel industry, built on an image of beauty and luxury, desperately hiding the suffering of sensitive, intelligent animals being farmed in filthy, intensive factory conditions or trapped for their fur.”

All this for, as the video puts it, “vanity”.