The bearskin caps worn by soldiers outside Buckingham Palace now cost more than £2,000 each, figures from the Ministry of Defence (MoD) show.
The cost of the ceremonial caps, made from the fur of black bears, soared by 30% in a year, according to figures revealed in response to a Freedom of Information request from animal welfare campaigners.
The People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (Peta) group are against using real fur in principle, but they say it is also now a financial as well as an ethical issue, with £1m spent on fur caps in recent years.
The MoD said: “We are open to exploring faux fur alternatives if they pass the necessary requirements."
However, the ministry spokesman said a fake fur version would have to satisfy “safety and durability considerations” and that “no alternative has met all those criteria to date”.
The sharp increase in price is explained by the MoD as the result of a change in the “contractual arrangements” for the caps, which are all made from the fur of bears hunted in Canada.
The cost of the caps worn by the King’s Guard rose from £1,560 each in 2022 to £2,040 in 2023.
Elisa Allen, of Peta, called on the MoD to “stop wasting taxpayer pounds on caps made from slaughtered wildlife, and switch to faux fur today”.
The distinctive tall caps are worn on ceremonial events such as Trooping the Colour, and the figures from the MoD show that 24 new caps were bought in 2023 and 13 in 2022. Over the past decade the amount spent on replacement caps has been more than £1m.
Aren’t PETA the people who run the cruel shelters killing animals in America?
No, they aren’t. This line of propaganda gets thrown around a lot, so I’m going to dispell it. PETA runs a shelter where they kill a lot of the animals that come in. They do this openly. They’ll try to adopt out animals if possible, but here’s the thing: PETA gets the worst of the worst because other shelters want to be the “no-kill shelters” to seem nice and upstanding. PETA gets the worst of the worst because pet mills exist with minimal regulation to pump out as many living, breathing, sentient animals as possible as a commodity. PETA gets the worst of the worst because people don’t treat pet ownership like the serious commitment it is and think before getting one. PETA gets the worst of the worst because people buy instead of adopting. PETA gets the worst of the worst because dipshit owners don’t get their pets spayed and neutered. This problem is horrific in America and seems to just be getting worse.
When PETA gets animals at their shelter, it’s almost exclusively ones which are terminally (often gruesomely) ill or badly injured and suffering immensely; ones which the owners want put down but can’t afford to at a veterinarian; ones which are so elderly as to be unadoptable; and ones which are so violent that it’s impossible for anyone to safely keep them. Essentially, PETA largely gets the unadoptables, and they often get them from “no-kill shelters”. And I really don’t exaggerate when I say “unadoptable”. They do try to adopt out the ones that plausibly can be, but that’s no guarantee either.
This isn’t PETA taking in borderline adoptable animals and then turning around and lazily or sadistically killing them. They aren’t the cause of the problem, no one else wants to solve it, and they step in to do what needs to be done for the animal’s well-being instead of the alternative, which is either letting the animal gruesomely die naturally (often after being abandoned by the owner) or letting the owner violently kill the animal (this happens more often than you’d think).
Essentially, PETA takes the fall for other people’s shitty, thoughtless actions, the pet mill industry, and “no-kill shelters” who actually do kill – just by pawning them off to someone who actually cares about animals’ well-being at best or turning them away to suffer an agonizing death at worst.
I hope you recognize that PETA understands how badly the shelter damages their reputation, and they keep it operating anyway. Want to know why? Because PETA would rather save animals from suffering than let them suffer to look good for PR, because they actually want to help, unlike “no-kill shelters”. On the PR side, they’re constantly running campaigns advising and teaching how to spay/neuter pets (they perform this for free in their area of Virginia if you can’t afford it elsewhere), to adopt not shop (including by holding adoption drives), and to just generally be more responsible with pet ownership. I imagine they’d be beyond relieved to see fewer animals come through their doors. (I’ll add that PETA runs a shelter, not multiple as your comment seems to suggest, but I wanted to save the more pedantic part for last.)
This line of propaganda is there so that people don’t have to confront the objectively, severely disgusting practices of the animal agriculture industry which they partake in, because hey, the people telling me it’s wrong and why and showing me mountains of evidence and suggesting viable alternatives are getting off on murdering puppies or something, so I can just ignore it.